


(beg the book to) turn the page

by bluesyturtle



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Adrian Mellon Lives, Canon Related, Childhood Trauma, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Everybody Lives, Friendship, Gen, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, POV Alternating, Recovery, Reunions, Slice of Life, Stanley Uris Lives, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27115015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: EDDIE LIVES! STAN LIVES! ADRIAN LIVES! The Losers talk about trauma and love and other scary things. It's a wacky wild time.Oh, yeah, and they're going to Sundance. Apparently.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, The Losers Club & The Losers Club (IT)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 26





	1. Forgiveness, ME

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie doesn't walk out of the house on Neibolt Street, but that's only because he has to be carried out. The weird thing is, he could've sworn Stan was there.
> 
> What could possibly be any weirder than that? He turns out to be kind of right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PLEASE READ: This chapter deals with That Scene we all pretend didn't happen, but completely irrevocably fucking happened. The Orgy in the sewer. If anyone feels this fic should be tagged with certain archive warnings, hit me up about it and I'll kindly do that. I don't get into it except to say that it happened, and that it was upsetting, but if that is at all harmful for you, or if it's going to cause you distress in any way, maybe miss this one. 
> 
> Please take care of yourselves. <3

_‘Cuz I get stuck where the villains get away  
_ _Somewhere in this wretched tale, there must be a line  
_ _Where the victim gets his way_  
 _Just one time  
_ _I’ll get mine_  
  


\- NEEDTOBREATHE, “Drive All Night”

The Revelation in the Hospital

Richie’s hands are shaking when he touches Eddie’s bandaged face. The tourniquet tied above the exposed meat of his arm has since soaked black, and so has a speck in the center of the grimy square on his cheek. His chin’s resting on his chest, and he doesn’t move as they approach. Beverly’s heart leaps up into her throat.

“Eddie?” Richie whispers, and the cistern groans around them.

Eddie groans, too.

“Oh, my God,” Richie breathes, snapping his hands away but fluttering them around Eddie’s shoulders and face. “Oh, my God, Eddie. You guys, we have to—”

Mike scoops him up off the mildewed ground. All around them the cistern begins to quake.

“We have to get out of here,” Mike says, throwing him over his shoulder in a fireman carry. “Let’s go!”

He runs then, and they have no choice but to follow. It takes all of them to get Eddie out through the flooded vat, and they have to drag him out of the house before it crumbles to dust, but he’s alive. He’s alive and gasping for air just like the rest of them. His arm—

God, his arm.

“Guys,” he moans. The flap of gauze that was clinging to his cheek is gone, and the gash there has started to ooze frothy blood.

“Okay, Eddie,” Ben says, gritting his teeth and kneeling next to him. “Okay, you just gotta stay awake, okay? I’m gonna carry you, but you have to stay awake.”

Beverly helps Eddie sit up, and together, she and Ben get him settled into his arms. He bounces Eddie higher against his chest and murmurs a hushed apology when Eddie cries out.

She jogs just at Ben’s shoulder, chattering to Eddie all the while, keeping him talking as much as she can. She keeps looking back to Richie to try and wave him over, but his eyes are distant still from the Deadlights, and he doesn’t budge from where he’s holding a brisk pace between Bill and Mike.

Blood drips down the length of Eddie’s mangled arm. There’s a spot of it toward the center that looks— bone-white—

 _“—anmekhit?”_ Eddie slurs, and Beverly tears her eyes away from the place where he’s bleeding.

“What did you say, Eddie?”

“Did… did Stan… make it?”

“Eddie… no, sweetheart. No, he didn’t. Remember?”

“But I… saw him. He was… at a beach, and he was alone,” he whispers, stopping to shiver violently. “Do you think… do you think that’s… true, somewhere, Bev?”

She thinks back to her own experience of the Deadlights, the things she’d seen that would come to pass, all the worlds there were and could be and never would. She thinks of Richie asking if he was handsome and how the answer could’ve only ever been yes, for all of them. Because she loves them, and they could never be ugly to her.

“Yes, Eddie,” she tells him, palming her face when she feels tears spill over. “I think it has to be true.”

“That’s… good… he looked…”

“What, Eddie?” she asks, touching the loose column of his neck to feel for his pulse, though it’s difficult to tell where it is when they’re running, _they’re running…_

“Eddie?” Ben asks, always keeping one ear to their conversation, just to know Eddie was still with them. “Oh, God, _oh, God—”_

He really takes off then, and Beverly can’t catch him. Mike keeps running after them in the direction of the hospital, but Beverly, Bill, and Richie watch them go with a cold fear settling back into their bones. Beverly turns to them, turns to Bill, at least, and then it’s just the two of them watching Richie sprint down the street and disappear around the corner.

“Did he s-say anything to you?” Bill asks, crossing his arms over the back of his head.

Beverly sets her hands on her knees and tries to catch her breath. “He asked about Stan. He thought—” Bent double, her whole face feels wet with tears and runoff from her nose. She straightens out and tries to smear the worst of it away from her eyes and mouth. “He thought he was alive, Bill.”

“What, in the Deadlights?”

“I guess so. Come on. We won’t catch them, but maybe we can find Richie before his legs give out.”

They don’t find Richie until they get to the hospital, and by then, the doctors have taken Eddie away. From there, it’s communicated to them that he’s going to be flown to Eastern Maine Medical for surgery, and if they leave now they might get there in time to see him post-operation.

“He’s alive,” Ben insists, catching Richie’s arms when he flails out against him. “Richie— Richie, listen to me. Listen. They’re flying him out to Bangor where he can get help from qualified surgeons. They wouldn’t do that if there wasn’t a chance, right? Richie.”

He calms then, with Ben’s hands grounding his shoulders and Bill securing his arms from behind so he’ll stay put.

“There’s a chance, okay? He’s not outta the woods,” he soothes, pausing when Richie struggles to get away, this time mostly so he can plaster his hands to his face to keep the sobs at bay. “But there’s a chance, Richie, and they’re gonna do everything they can to save him.”

“What about his arm?” he asks in a hoarse, ragged voice, taking his hands away and dropping them at his sides when Bill lets go of him. “What about his arm, Ben?”

They all go quiet, having no answer to give him. Beverly hadn’t let herself think that far ahead. She’d noticed what it looked like, but she hadn’t let herself think—

Practically, she understands why Richie’s thinking about it. Why he might be thinking about it for Eddie’s sake, for the purpose of being responsible for him. And again, practically, she knows why the rest of them haven’t.

“Will you love him any less for it, Rich?” she asks him, voice breaking on the question.

He whips around to face her. His face is sheet-white. “No,” he says, and his eyes spill over behind his cracked glasses.

She takes his hands in hers and pulls him into a hug. The both of them are trembling.

“Then think about that instead, Rich. Think about—” Her breath catches in her throat, and his arms tighten around her. “Think about loving him and wanting him to live, and don’t think about the rest.”

“Bev’s r-right, Richie,” Bill says, palming the back of his neck but not to restrain him this time. “L-l-l-let him f-fight this first.”

“We’ll get through it together, Richie,” Mike promises him, stepping in next to Beverly so Richie will look at him. “No matter what happens.”

Richie nods. On that, at least, they can all agree.

Ben looks around the cramped little lobby they’re standing in, and at the sour looks they’re pulling. He scratches at the dried sewage clinging to his neck. “How about we get cleaned up and drive down to Bangor? There’s nothing we can do for him here.”

“Okay,” Richie says, but his eyes are down the hall where they must’ve ushered Eddie off and away.

Beverly squeezes his hand and tries to smile. “Eddie’ll be there before we even get out of Derry, Richie. The least we can do is… scrub all of this off first.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.” He glances down at himself and then at all of them. “Guess we do sorta smell like the Day Three port-o-potties at Coachella.”

Mike snorts and leads the way to the exit doors. Ben and Bill follow after him, and Beverly stays behind long enough to loop her elbow through Richie’s so they’ll walk together. His ankles pop when they get going.

“Surprised I didn’t give myself a fuckin’ hernia chasing after those two track star idiots.”

Beverly laughs, surprising both of them. She tries to smother the sound with her hand when the laugh devolves into a giggling fit she just can’t stifle. That gets Richie chuckling, too.

“Oh, my God, you laugh like such a sorority girl,” he teases, and then, when she swats him, “Ow!”

But it feels good to laugh. Even if Eddie’s got a long fight ahead of him, and even if Beverly can’t shake the impossible image of Stan on a beach somewhere from her mind, there’s hope. There’s hope that Eddie will pull through, and there’s hope that the layers and layers of blood and muck on her skin will come off in the shower, and there’s hope that at the end of a long drive to Bangor, they’ll see Eddie again, and he’ll see them.

They wait in the lobby of Eastern Maine Medical Center a solid three hours before someone comes to talk to them.

A nurse in lavender scrubs with a clipboard looks around the mostly empty waiting room, then over at them, and before he even opens his mouth to speak, they close in on him. “All of you are here for Mr. Kaspbrak?” he asks, not flustered in the slightest.

“Yes,” Bill replies.

“Is he alive?” Mike asks, cutting right to the chase and setting his hand on Richie’s shoulder to steady him.

Beverly holds on to Richie’s arm tightly, just in case. Just in case he falls, or she does.

“He’s alive,” the nurse answers easily, holding up his hand when they collectively release the breath they’d been holding. “You did well with the tourniquet. Definitely saved his life. Unfortunately, we couldn’t save the arm.”

There’s a beat of silence, and then, Richie’s voice breaks around the question, “Can we see him?”

“He’s sleeping, and very heavily sedated,” the nurse— Ahmed, his name tag reads— warns. “But you can go in and see him one at a time. There’s still some risk of infection, but he really is doing well. We expect him to make a full recovery.”

Ahmed gives them the room number and gestures down the correct corridor before smiling kindly and turning on his heel to go. Beverly expects Richie to ask to go first, but he shrinks at the suggestion. Even his voice gets small.

“I don’t know if I can look at him yet. What if… what if…” and then he sobs, eyes slamming closed behind the awkward readers they’d picked up for him at the first Walgreens they passed coming off the highway.

“Richie,” she soothes, pulling him in close and wrapping him in a hug. “He’s okay,” she tells him, promising it, even through the rising wobble in her own voice. “He’s okay, Richie.”

“I’ll go,” Bill offers with a voice that could clear auditoriums. He slips in next to her to drop his hand into Richie’s hair. “I’ll go first, Rich. Okay?”

Richie nods, keeping his head down. Beverly can feel tears splattering against her shirt and hugs him tighter before guiding him back to the waiting room.

Eastern Maine Medical is exactly the kind of place Eddie would choose to be hospitalized, if he had actually been given any say in the matter. The lobby is spacious and clutter-free, the floors shine, and the windows glisten, nary a speck or smudge to be seen anywhere.

Bill comes back a while later to trade places with Mike. He sits next to Richie and snakes an arm around him so Bev can have her hands free and stand up to stretch. “There’s n-nothing to be afraid of, Richie,” Bill tells him.

Ben takes up the free chair to his right and winds his arm around Richie, too. “He’s alive and breathing because of you,” he adds. “He’d want you to be in there with him.”

“Yeah, right,” Richie says, sniffling, laughing a moment later. He takes the shiny plastic readers off his face to wipe at his eyes. “He’d bitch at me and call me an allergen risk.”

“And you’d love every minute of it,” Bev teases, just to keep him laughing, and smiles when it works.

But then it wobbles on his face, and he looks down at his hands, tears hitting his white knuckles and the face of his busted watch. “You guys,” he whispers, shoulders shaking.

“Richie,” Bill murmurs back, holding him and pressing his forehead to Richie’s temple. “Richie, do you r-remember when Eddie b-b-broke his arm?” Bill catches Richie’s face in his hands when he nods. “Just l-l-look at me, okay, Rich? Look at me.” He waits for Richie’s myopic blink. “He’s okay, Rich.”

Richie’s breath stutters in his throat, and he says, whisper soft, “I watched him die, Bill. In the Deadlights. So many times.”

“Well, I w-watched him b-breathe. In there. Because of y-y-you, Rich. Because of you. B-because you saved him.”

Richie shuts his eyes. Bill rubs his back and looks over his bowed head to Ben who brings himself closer, too. Beverly crouches in front of Richie to pile her arms on his knees, giving herself over as an anchor. There’s a creak of plastic behind him, and then Mike’s kneeling over the back of Richie’s chair to complete the dog pile.

“I’m glad we’re together again,” Mike croons, squeezing Richie’s shoulder with his arm crossed over his chest like they’re pledging the same oath. With his other hand, he claps Ben on the back. “You guys have no idea how much I missed you.”

“Still don’t know how you managed to keep your distance all those years, Mikey,” Ben says, covering Mike’s hand with his own when it slips over his shoulder. “I couldn’t have stayed away if it was me.”

“That’s why you’re the architect and Mike’s the historian,” Beverly says, beaming up at Ben and then at Mike. Softer, for Richie, she asks him, “How did he look?”

“Little,” Mike answers, smiling wistfully. He takes his hand off Ben’s shoulder to ruffle Richie’s hair and adds, “Cute.”

“That’s my line,” Richie mumbles, shoving his glasses back onto his face.

“He’s always been a fighter,” Mike says, settling his hands so that he almost looks like a wrestler going in for a chokehold, barring the way Richie leans back into him. “He’ll fight now, too, Richie. You know it. He’s not done yet. Think you wanna go see him now? Remind yourself how much of a fighter he is?”

For a moment, Richie looks like he’s about to say no, but then he takes a deep breath, presses his hand to Mike’s, and says, “Hell yeah, Mikey.”

He’s gone maybe two minutes before a code comes down over the intercom and nurses start jogging in the direction of Eddie’s room.

“Uh, guys?” Bill says, standing up.

Beverly jumps to her feet, too. No one comes to get them, so they venture out into the hallway and spot Richie at the very end of the long corridor. He’s leaning up against the wall opposite Eddie’s room staring blankly at the door. They run to meet him.

“Richie,” Mike calls out. “What happened?”

“He woke up,” Richie tells him, dazed. “He woke up. He’s awake.”

“Does that mean they’ll let us all in to see him?” Ben wonders out loud, watching the door to Eddie’s room swing open.

They don’t, as it happens. There’s still an infection risk to consider, and they don’t want people filling up the room in case the doctor comes by to make their rounds and check Eddie’s chart. By the time Beverly gets her allotted time with Eddie, Bill and Mike are checking them into a nearby hotel, and Ben’s outside with Richie trying to keep him from wearing a path into the tile with his relentless pacing.

Eddie does look very little in his hospital bed. The clean square on his cheek is better suited to protect him than the makeshift bandage they’d finagled for him, and cleaner, too, which she’s sure he’ll appreciate. All of his bandages are clean and sterile. Neat lines and smooth white gauze. No sign of the blood or greywater he’d been covered in when they gave him up. No trace of the terrible way he screamed when It bit him.

Beverly takes the chair next to his bed and presses her hand to his. The dark fan of his eyelashes flutters. She’s never noticed how long they are.

“Bevvie,” he mumbles on an exhale, cracking his eyes open.

Her heart breaks in her chest. She joins her hands together around his, crying before she’s even aware of the tears slipping down her face.

“No, Bev,” he whispers, closing his eyes again. He looks so tired. “Don’t be sad.”

“I’m not sad, Eddie,” she laughs, leaning up to kiss his forehead. “I’m happy. I’m so happy. We were— worried. About you.”

“Why?” He squints suspiciously at her. “Oh, I get it,” he slurs, sounding almost coy. “Hospitals have germs, and Eddie can’t stand germs.”

Beverly bites her lip, carefully keeping her eyes on his face, never letting them stray to his arm.

“You know what I don’t get?” he asks in a wandering kind of voice that seems to come from very far back in his throat. “As much time as I’ve spent crawling around in sewers… what’s a doorknob or a toilet seat gonna do? And I know, I know,” he mumbles, barely moving his lips, “staphylococcogitis, or whatever the fuck. There’s always something. But they’re just… more gazebos, Bevvie, aren’t they? Trying to control… everything down to the… to the bacteria on a… subway car…” he sighs, trailing off for long enough that she thinks, for a long few seconds, that maybe he’s fallen asleep. “It was all just the same thing… don’t you think?”

“What was the same, Eddie?”

“The… fear, Bev,” he murmurs, opening his eyes and looking right at her with cloudy eyes. “My fear. It was… it was the same as yours, wasn’t it?”

Beverly thinks about blood. A sink full of it. A bathroom stall filling up to drown her in it. Red and red and red.

Her period.

Her father. Trying to stay his little perfect girl forever so he wouldn’t—

So he—

“Fluids,” Eddie says, almost without any volume behind his voice at all. “Something—” The word fragments, and when she looks up at his face, she’s surprised to see tears pushing through the scrunched trenches of his closed eyes. “—getting in,” he whispers in a strangled, breathless voice. “Making you into someone else.”

His heartbeat on the monitor, Beverly notices, once she can hear over the blood rushing in her ears, is racing wildly. Faster and faster.

“Eddie?” she breathes, startled, getting to her feet. Wondering if she should call the doctor.

“Did I tell you what It said to me? As the Leper?” he gasps opening his eyes again. “It wanted to… put Its mouth on my… my…”

“It’s dead, Eddie,” she tells him, trying to comfort him, trying to remind him that he’s safe. She reaches down to hold his hand, feeling— strange, at the way his eyes track down and stay there, keyed in on her hand covering his.

His face goes blank, and then his eyes get wide and watery. “You made me do it,” he whispers.

“Eddie?”

His Adam’s apple bobs around a thick swallow. He looks up from their hands to her face, not seeing her. Seeing through her into the past. His eyes are wild and disbelieving— afraid. Afraid of her, and shaking with it. His voice whittles down almost to nothing, but enough to hear, enough to understand when he says, “You took my hand, just like that. And you made me.”

And then Beverly remembers, too.

Their first time in the belly of the beast when they were lost, when she’d reached for all of them, when she’d reached for Eddie first.

When he said no. When he cried. When she didn’t stop.

“Eddie…”

“You made me do it,” he moans, ripping his hand out of hers to paw muzzily at his tear-streaked face. “You were afraid, too. Why did you make me?”

She thought—

She thought it meant that they’d be connected, unbreakable, and when Eddie hadn’t wanted to, she’d felt—

Not afraid, not a bit, but—

Bile rises in her throat. She tastes it against the back of her tongue and chokes it down. Did she learn that from her father?

That sex could be about power before it could be about feeling safe, or loved, or respected? That touching another person to hurt them, even if they trusted you never ever to do that, could feel, in its own despicable way, good?

How could she? She can’t imagine doing that to anyone, now, but to know she’s already done it, and to Eddie?

Her stomach turns, and this time she does throw up. Right into the wastebasket by Eddie’s bed.

“Eddie,” she gasps, breaking the string of saliva clinging to her lip. “I’m sorry.” She doesn’t realize she’s sobbing until there’s a light tap on the back of her head, joined by another and another, Eddie’s fingertips, and then his hand, settling in her hair.

“Don’t be sad, Bevvie,” he whispers again.

She pushes the bin away from her and moves so she can sit up on her knees with one hand tentatively resting on the edge of his bed, fingers digging into the crisp sheets. Her breathing won’t slow down, and her heart feels fit to burst right out of her chest. Eddie’s not doing much better, and that only deepens her shame.

“I’m…” she hiccups, not able to say this time that she isn’t sad. There are no words that can touch the full scope of that grief or the gravity of what she’s done. “I’m disgusting. How can you stand the sight of me?”

He lowers his hand to thumb at a fresh line of tears that break loose down her cheek. A muscle in his jaw twitches, and a fresh stream of tears runs down his face to match hers. “Because…” A shuddering breath cuts through him, but he waits it out to say, “We had the same fear.”

It hits her right in the chest. Her face crumples. She presses her forehead against the starched bedsheet and cries silently, Eddie’s hand in her hair all the while.

“It’s controlled us long enough, hasn’t it?” he mumbles, sounding half-asleep already.

She turns so her cheek is laid flat against the bed, his palm cradling the back of her head. Her weeping’s diminished to the point where at least her shoulders have stopped heaving, but the tears are still coming.

“Bevvie?” he murmurs. “I forgive you.”

Her eyes slam closed again, more tears pushing through and wetting the painful grimace of her mouth. “I don’t think I can forgive myself.”

“We’ve been… punished enough,” he sighs, glancing sleepily at the sterile dressings where his arm used to be. A little knit stitches its way between his eyebrows, and he looks every bit the boy she knew growing up. Every bit her best friend in all the world. “Haven’t we… earned some rest?”

“You can sleep if you’re tired, Eddie,” she tells him, sitting up and using her sleeve to dry her face.

“’s not what I mean,” he says intently, though his heavy-lidded eyes suggest otherwise. His hand drops soundly to the bedspread and doesn’t move. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, trying to bolster his strength, maybe, but only lulling himself further into a medicated sleep. Eyes still firmly shut, chest rising one more time with a full-bodied inhale, he murmurs, “That’s not… you know that I…”

He drifts off in the middle of saying it, and then there’s only his breathing and the sound of his heart monitor to fill the room.

She watches him sleep, loving him so completely that it aches in her chest.

There’s a knock at the door, and Ben pokes his head in. He looks over his shoulder into the hallway and lets himself in, quietly shutting the door behind him. He walks over quiet as a church mouse and kneels beside her. “Hey,” he whispers, touching her burning cheek with cool fingers, catching her tears. “Are you okay?”

It feels like there are thorns inside her heart, twisting and yanking and rupturing everything they touch. She looks down, not knowing how to tell him that, not knowing how to say it to him when Ben would never willingly hurt anyone, whether he loved them or not.

“Bev, what’s wrong?” he asks, alarmed, but soft still, mindful of Eddie.

The door opens behind them. “You assholes,” Richie mutters without heat. “Our handsome nurse friend very clearly said _one at a time_ — Bev?”

“He’s sleeping,” she gasps through her tears. “I don’t want to wake him.”

“Well—” Richie looks at Ben, shrugs, and gets his around her to help her up. “It’s about time we cleared out anyway.”

Ben holds out his arms, and she falls into them. “You’re exhausted,” he says into her hair. “And you haven’t eaten all day. We’ll go meet Mike and Bill at the hotel, grab dinner, and you’ll feel better, okay? I promise.”

Beverly doesn’t believe him, but she goes with him to the door anyway, not wanting to get upset or kick up a scene when she might wake Eddie. He needs to rest. He needs to get better.

“Right behind you guys,” Richie says, but he’s not, he’s sitting on the edge of Eddie’s bed.

It feels right, though, so they leave him to say goodnight. If he does wake Eddie, at least— at least she knows Eddie will feel safe with Richie.

The hotel Bill picked is actually a little motel on the waterfront. It’s quiet and clean, and by the time they get there, the Indian food Mike ordered is already waiting for them. They sit down in a daze, all of them bone tired and starving, ready to go to bed as soon as soon as they’re done. Remembering what Eddie said about Stan sitting on a beach somewhere, Beverly cracks open a beer and pushes it to one of the two empty chairs they brought over from the neighboring patios. Richie watches her do it and slides over a glass of water to the chair beside it.

“Not supposed to mix booze with painkillers, right?” Richie rolls his eyes at Bill’s huffed laugh. “I mean, yes, I hear you, but not everyone’s on our level of High-Functioning Alcoholic.”

Choking on his next swig of beer, Bill coughs and says, “That’s n-not what I was thinking.”

“I know what you were thinking,” Mike muses, smiling privately in Bill’s direction, though he keeps eating happily and doesn’t look up from his food.

“It’s not polite to communicate telepathically at the dinner table,” Richie says, pointing his fork at both of them. “I feel alienated _and_ jealous. Are you happy?”

“Richie, it’s just,” Bill says, stopping to laugh. His eyes are very blue when he looks up. They always looked bluer when he smiled, and that’s still true. “Y-you and Eddie. Even when you’re m-m-messing around, you’re taking care of him.”

There’s a clatter, and Beverly realizes, a few long seconds after they’ve all turned to look at her, that she’s dropped her fork. And then she realizes she hasn’t touched her food.

“Bev?” Ben angles his whole body toward her. “Bev, you’re shaking.”

“I’m tired,” she whispers, pushing her chair back and standing on wobbly legs. “I’m just tired.”

They let her go, but the silence she leaves behind follows her all the way to the parking lot at the front of the motel. She digs out a pack of cigarettes, drops her lighter, and sits on a concrete spacer without trying to find it. She’s crying again, and more than just feeling hideous, she feels pathetic. Eddie deserves more from her than self-pity, but she can’t help it.

He forgave her. Shouldn’t that make it easier to bear?

She hears footsteps behind her and expects to see Ben coming around to kneel in front of her again, but instead she hears ankles, and then knees, popping. Richie sits next to her on the spacer. He scoops up her lighter and flicks at the spark wheel without igniting the flame. Glancing in her direction, seeing her tears, he lights it, and holds it there until he can dig out a cigarette.

“Thanks, Rich.”

He hums, lets the fire go out, and sets the lighter on the spacer between them. She holds the cigarette out to him and he takes it. For a second he just holds it aloft with a philosophical look on his face.

“The 5 rockets up to an 8,” he says, taking a long drag and hollowing out his cheeks for flair. With the filter held between his teeth and smoke barreling out of his mouth, he adds, doing a perfect John Travolta, “Now where’s my damn sponsorship?”

“You’re not a 5, Richie,” she tells him, plucking the cigarette out of his mouth.

“You have to say that because you love me.”

“I do love you, but that’s not why I’m saying it.”

They finish the cigarette, and she lights another one, mostly just to watch it burn up and feed smoke up into the full moon. She taps out the ashes, finally smearing the nub into the asphalt, and then it’s just the two of them in a quiet parking lot, stinking of her cigarettes. She looks over at him, thinking, honestly, that between his jaw and his cheekbones and his high forehead, he really is beautiful. Especially serious, but laughing, too. He’s handsome. All the pieces he always had, making sense. Serene in adulthood, where they’d been awkward in childhood.

Because children are supposed to have room to grow.

“Do you remember the first time we fought It?” she asks him, making herself breathe when the memory gets her heart racing again.

“Yeah, now I do,” he answers easily. “Bill tried to get us to leave him behind, but we wouldn’t.”

She nods, remembering that, too. “Do you remember… when we got lost?”

He blinks at her, and somehow, the readers on his face look even more plastic now than they did in full daylight. “You mean when Bill went ahead, and Stan— when we had to pull that thing off his face?”

“No, Richie. No… after. When we were trying to find our way out.”

He thinks for a long time, motionless while he navigates the mazes of memory. Something in his face changes. His jaw twitches. “Oh,” he says, and looks at her, surprised, but not much else. “Weird. I completely blocked that out.”

“So did I.” She bites her lip and lets it go. “Eddie reminded me.”

For a long time he stares at her not understanding why that makes any difference, and then his gaze retreats inward, searching the event in his mind for context. He sucks in a sharp breath.

She shakes her head, unable to speak in her own defense, eyes sore and stinging.

“Bev… we were kids,” he says, a little desperately, like he doesn’t know what else he can say.

“We were kids,” she repeats, watching him through her tears and trying to breathe. “We were kids, Richie. He said no. He said— he said it so many times, Rich, and I didn’t—”

“Bev,” he says again, shaken now, shaking, just like she is. “That’s…”

“He was afraid, and he trusted me, and I— I did something unforgivable. And he forgave me anyway.”

Richie stares out at nothing, maybe following the breadcrumbs of his memories again. Seeking back to that moment she hasn’t been able to unsee since Eddie looked at her and said, _You took my hand, just like that. And you made me._

He was so small, and she loved him. She always has loved him. Why did she need to take anything from him to feel powerful?

“Eddie… loves you, Bev.” Richie tries to sniffle quietly and pushes his fingers under the lenses of his glasses. His voice gets thicker, but he talks through it. “We all love you. We’ve been through hell, and we’re still standing because of that. Because we’re… we’re Losers, right? And we stick together.”

She nods, but she’s not sure it’s true. She’s not sure it covers this. She’s not sure anything can.

“You said he forgave you?” He watches her face for a moment, then he looks up at the moon. “What else did he say?”

“He said our fear was the same,” she says, pressing her hand to her throat. “That he understood why it happened, and he didn’t want it to control us anymore.”

“Huh. So that’s what he meant,” he mumbles, still just staring up at the moon. “After you and Ben left, he grabbed my hand and said, _You should rest, too._ Thought he was saying I looked like shit, but I guess he thought he was talking to you.” He drops his gaze to the level of the parking lot, murmuring under his breath to himself, “Your fear was the same?”

Beverly looks away. She hadn’t really understood what Eddie meant by that either, but there had been other things to think about then. Other things to remember.

“But you saw blood, and he saw a leper.”

“Blood, Richie,” she says, looking at him. “Do you remember the day we met? At the pharmacy? I was there to buy tampons.”

He frowns, not understanding, at first. “Oh. Uh. Right. But that still doesn’t—”

“It offered him sex, Richie,” she tells him, and even then, only because she remembers that Eddie did tell them that part. Even if they might’ve forgotten. “The leper.”

Richie’s quiet for a long time then, and Beverly wonders what he’s thinking about. She wonders what connections he’s making between her fear and Eddie’s, or what specifically they were so afraid of, but when he speaks again, it turns out to be something else entirely.

“I didn’t see a clown,” he whispers.

“What?”

“You asked me once what I saw. When we were kids. I told you it was a clown, but it wasn’t.” He takes off his glasses and presses his fingers to his eyes. “The clown _was_ there, but it… _It_ … After the thing at Neibolt Street, after Mrs. K. took Eddie away. I hadn’t seen you guys in a while, and I was at the arcade by myself.”

“What did you see, Richie?” she asks him in a soft voice.

“It wasn’t what I saw, at first. It was something that— that happened.” He presses his hand to his mouth. “There was a kid there, he… we were playing some game, and I gave him a token, and… our hands… my fucking— ” He drops his hand, and his face is wet, but he’s laughing. _“My dirty little secret.”_

She watches him, waiting, not understanding. Focusing on him at least keeps her from feeling sorry for herself.

“I kissed a guy that summer,” he says in a strange, tight voice, letting out a long, uneven breath and sagging once it’s out of him. “On a dare. And I had to act like—” His voice shakes. He wrings his hands in his lap. “I had to act like…”

Beverly thinks about hiding tampons in her room and washing the stains out of her clothes until the bleach made her nail beds scream. She thinks about wearing the mask of a little girl so she wouldn’t look like the slut her classmates were too keen to say she was. Because looking that way to her father would’ve meant—

“I had to act like I didn’t want to,” Richie moans, slapping his hand over his mouth. His breath comes faster, and she hovers her hand over his shoulder, not sure if that’s okay. Not sure if any of them will ever want her to touch them again, knowing what she knows of herself. “Bev, I had to act like it was disgusting. Like I hated it. _Like I was disgusting—”_

“Richie…”

He covers his face with his hands, shuddering. She touches his back, uncertain, but he sinks back against her hand, shaking. Crying.

“And that kid at the arcade, when our hands touched, I felt like— and Bowers saw. He fucking saw, and he called me— he said…”

Beverly digs her blunt nails into his hair, to make him stop. She can guess well enough which word he’s trying to make himself say, and she never wants to hear it on his lips. Not ever.

“It’s not your fault, Richie,” she tells him, lightening her touch when she feels the strain of carrying that word go out of him. She thinks about the newspaper clippings Mike had hanging in the loft documenting an assault of two men on the Kissing Bridge, and the bigot who went over the side. Over a hat, the two survivors said. Because they’d been kissing in public, in Derry. “You had to be safe. You had to take care of yourself. We all did.”

“That’s what Eddie meant,” he says, scrubbing at his eyes and trying to catch his breath. “You think being scared protects you from ever getting hurt, but all it does is tie your hands behind your back so the other guy can keep hitting you.”

“Or teach you how to tie up someone else’s hands,” Beverly mumbles.

He looks at her, glasses halfway to his face. She bites her lip again, holding it in her teeth, and looks down at her feet.

Richie reaches across her shoulders with one arm and settles it over her back. Safe, warm. True protection. Having every opportunity to crush, but comforting instead. What real power feels like.

“Bev, if he said he forgave you, and if… y’know, if he said that he gets it, then he forgives you, and he gets it. He only ever takes a second to figure out how he feels about anything, right? I mean, we’re talking about the same guy, aren’t we?”

In spite of herself, she smiles. It stings on her lips, but in a cleansing kind of way. Like something dark and cavernous finally burning itself out. Hollow but for the smoke, and the heat.

“Because Eddie’s a lotta things. He’s adorable,” he says matter-of-factly, counting on her to laugh. “He’s high-strung, he’s bossy, he’s the only guy I know who could pull of a fanny pack in 1985 _and_ in 2016, and he’s just a teeny tiny bit stuck-up. In the nicest way possible. Like, the only way anyone could have their nose that high up in the air but still mostly be considered a nice guy. Even if he is kind of a bitch a lot of the time. He’s all those things, just like we’re all a bunch of things that shouldn’t make sense. But he’s not a liar.”

She presses her fingers to her lips. They’re starting to burn now. Her whole face is aching.

“I can’t tell you what to do, Bev, and neither can he. Obviously. He gave it his best shot, and you still feel like shit.”

“I think I need to feel like shit for a while, but I… feel better now,” she tells him, meaning it. Promising it. “And I’m glad I told you.”

“Yeah? Well, good. Because I feel like puking.”

“That’s such a 5 move, Rich.”

He gasps, ignoring the few slick patches of tears on his cheeks to theatrically clutch his imaginary pearls. _“I knew it!”_

Beverly laughs, a small one. But it’s a start, she thinks. One foot forward.

Richie sticks his glasses back on his face. He wrinkles his nose. “I can’t see shit with these dinky little lenses.” At her laugh, louder this time, he turns a serious, scandalized look her way and bobs them a few times like he’s waving at her with them. “No, really. Who _are_ you?”

Real power, she thinks, smiling. It’s always been his. All of theirs. She’ll find her way back to it, eventually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why have I done this to myself? 
> 
> Well, because Andy Muschietti said Canon Matters™ and then gave Mike’s arc as historian to Ben and went out of his way to make Bill seem like a decent guy and not a creep who’s dtf when Beverly thinks he’s her mystery crush and took Audra out of the boss fight with It just to further demonize Mike by having him drug Bill and lie to the Losers en masse. 
> 
> Alexa, play John Cena’s theme song.


	2. Second Chance, GA

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stan lives, saves Eddie's life, and goes to two very different beaches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for mentions of a suicide attempt, some self-harm, a dramatized take on the ensuing hospitalization, and scars.

The Sunburn at the Beach

_“Stan?”_

He’s sleeping.

He’s been sleeping since they moved him here from Northside. Since he woke up screaming about a clown with a glowing, murdering lure in its gullet.

Those first few days before they figured out how to keep him asleep, his bandages kept soaking through, and sometimes, sometimes, it wasn’t only in his head. Sometimes he really was bleeding. Even when they took pains to remove every sharp thing from his room, and even when he couldn’t get his hands free just to scratch his nose, there’d be red and red _and red,_ and _It_ was all he could think.

 _It_.

His final will and testament, after the letters. After goodbye, and I love you, and I’m sorry.

Today he hovers in between sleeping and waking, and someone— _else_ is looking at him. Not his doctors with their clipboards, not Patty with her nervous hands and frightful tears, not the clown or the waxen face from his father’s study or the floating red balloons or Patrick Hockstetter’s dead, bloated face.

Someone else. Someone with big, worried eyes the color of resin, and a curious, near-frowning mouth. Querulous, and beloved. Reminding him.

_“Eddie?”_

_“Oh, man. Am I dying? Am I already dead?”_

Stan bolts upright in his little bed. He’s had morphine to sleep the last two nights to quell the worst of his fits, but his head clears like a gunshot ringing out and cascading to silence.

“Eddie,” he gasps, yanking hard at his restraints and going nowhere.

His heart’s going a mile a minute, and he can hear it on the monitor. Someone will come soon. He doesn’t have time. Neither does Eddie.

 _“Eddie, wait!_ Just— wait,” he grits out, wrenching hard on his hand until— there’s a hard snap and stomach acid burning his throat, but his hand comes free. He’s bleeding again, but that doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. Nothing matters, except— “Eddie,” he’s saying, “take mine, take mine, _take mine…”_

Then there are people storming the room, and the pain in his arm is incredible, and for a moment, just one, the clown is there, grinning at him, wanting him.

To him, or her, or whatever the hell It is, Stan thinks, _You won’t ever have my heart. You won’t ever. Not today, not in twenty-seven years, not in a hundred. Not in a million. Fuck you. Fuck you._ ** _Fuck you._**

He thinks, _Eddie. I love you. I’m sorry. Goodbye._

Next thing he knows he’s on a beach watching the sun go down over his life, and Eddie’s with him. Maybe they’re both dead, and this is what the afterlife looks like.

He wasn’t raised to believe in heaven or hell. He was raised to believe in life and lesson and legacy, continuing on in memory or in monument, but not in motion, not as anything that continues to feel and think and yearn. He looks at Eddie, at the strange fissures interrupting the shape of him, the shadow in his cheek and the blur over his arm.

Stan touches his own arm, the spot that burned in him like fire, enough to sear flesh from bone. There are missing pieces in him, too. The gouges in his wrists are fuzzed over. As if those wounds have been erased, as if they don’t exist here. Wherever here is.

A line of baby sea turtles migrates slowly toward the roiling rise and fall of foam lapping at the shore. Stan watches them go and tips his head back to the sky, wary of black vultures or frigate birds. But the sky is clear. No birds, no planes, no clouds. No balloons. Only blue water and an incorruptible horizon exploding with the sunset.

 _“We killed It,”_ Eddie says, eyes on the steady stream of hatchlings struggling toward the tide. _“I wanted to tell you.”_

Stan thinks of the letter he drafted with Eddie’s name on it. He thinks about how much he wants Eddie to read it, and to know what the last thing Stan thought of him was, how much his heart was full for him and for all the Losers.

 _“Thanks,”_ he says, because it’s hard to make the right words come in a dream.

 _“I guess I am dead, if you’re here,”_ Eddie says, after a moment, tearing his eyes away from the turtles to look at Stan. He looks oddly at peace. _“I thought I’d be pissed if I died, but there’s no room to be mad, is there? Not with everything else.”_

 _“No,”_ Stan agrees. He knows all about that. How much fear and dread and worry there can be, and yet still, all of those dark and ugly thoughts wind up dwarfed by their own bright mirror, extinguished by the love that champions them all.

Eddie smiles, and while there are pieces of him Stan can’t see just like there are pieces of himself he can’t see, his tears are as solid as any part of him that made it here. He says, _“I missed you, Stan.”_

 _“I missed you, too.”_ And because sometimes dreams do go the way of the dreamer, he scoots over and throws his arms around Eddie to hug him, as tightly as he can, for however much longer they have. _“Don’t be sad, Eddie.”_ A thought occurs to him, and he pulls back to say, _“Maybe we’ll both wake up in the hospital. That’s what happened to me the last time I thought I was dead.”_

For a second, Eddie’s face is blank with surprise, and then it fills with a look so incredulous and imperious that Stan’s transported back to that runoff tunnel when they were kids— _Have you ever heard of a_ ** _staph infection?_**

_“What do you mean you woke up in the hospital—”_

Stan opens his eyes and feels different.

The bandages on both his wrists have been changed, and there’s an ache deep in his arm like he just got a flu shot on steroids. Looking down at his hand, he can see that his thumb’s been set and splintered, and the ache beneath the morphine cloud is profound.

He cranes his neck until he can work part of his shirt between his teeth, and even moving that much, even the clumsy scraping of his teeth at his shoulder sends great shocks of pain all the way down to his fingertips. He manages to roll his sleeve up high enough to reveal the very bottom of a bruise so dark it almost looks charred.

It hurts. Even so, he smiles at the sight of it.

He can’t know where Eddie is, or if he’s anywhere, but the beach had felt so real. And if he’s allowed to wake up too warm in this bed, then Eddie’s allowed to wake up again, too. Maybe he will. Maybe he made it. Maybe they all made it.

The doctor comes to see him the following morning for an evaluation. Stan can’t remember ever talking to her before, but she seems nice enough. Serious, kind of abrupt. Not a personality type he’s unfamiliar with.

The trick is in knowing what to say so they’ll let him out. It isn’t easy explaining his recent behavior such that an outsider looking in would understand, and the constant stream of antipsychotics and antidepressants he’s on make it even harder to stay coherent. He can’t say he blames them. Still, he’d like to be released.

He’s allowed one phone call a day for a period of thirty minutes. When he calls her to ask, Patty won’t give him Mike’s number. Again, he doesn’t blame her.

The call he sinks trying to reach Mike on the Derry Library’s landline doesn’t get him anywhere. There’s no forwarding number, no patch through to a cell phone, no nothing. He’s gone. Whoever made it out, they didn’t stick around to watch the dust settle.

He can’t worry about it. He tries to pour all his efforts into getting out.

* * *

Finally, they can’t hold him anymore, and they do have to let him loose. He doesn’t know how much he succeeded at convincing them that he’s not going to be a menace to society or to himself, but honestly, he’s an accountant who collects bird puzzles for fun. His only crime going back twenty years is carving out two letters in his own blood, and scaring his wife.

The veins he opened will scar, and the thought of what they’ll look like moon-colored and fuzzy at the edges where the texture of his skin gives way to scar tissue, makes him feel… relieved. It reminds him of the beach, of that snapshot into a quiet corner of eternity he didn’t know existed.

There’s nothing for him at intake. He doesn’t know why he thought they would’ve, when he went into the bathtub naked and empty-handed but for sheer force of will, and the hope that it would be enough.

Patty picks up him up an hour later in clothes the staff turned up from the Donations bin. The shirt gapes over one shoulder and the joggers are about half a size too tight on him, but they’re enough. She drives them home in tense silence, and her eyes constantly track back to the bandages on his wrists.

“Thank you for coming to get me, Patty,” he says gently, not used to speaking with his own voice when he’s been using an ancient holdover from his time working in Retail to try and get released sooner.

Not that it worked. Not that any of it worked.

She doesn’t respond, and he doesn’t think there’s anything ominous to it until she bursts into tears at a red light. “Do you have any idea…?” she starts, but her voice tapers off like wet paper. Sobbing and not seeing the green light, she whimpers a plaintive, “Stanley…”

He spares a glance for the cars in the rearview mirror and hits the hazards. Immediately cars whip around them and speed ahead to catch the light. Every one of them lays down on the horn and yells or offers middle fingers through their open windows, but it only takes the span of one light change to weed them all out. The next batch of cars stays out of their lane entirely, and Stan’s glad for it. They hadn’t bothered him at all, but he knows how anxious the road rage makes her.

“Patty, I’m sorry. I can’t explain it in a way that’ll make any sense, not right now, but I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“You were so… cold,” she whispers, trembling all over and weeping. Inconsolable. “Stanley, you were so cold, and pale. I’d never seen you like that, not ever, and I thought…”

“I know.”

“I touched you and you didn’t even feel human,” she cries, pressing her hands to her mouth and shivering. “You felt like the fish at the supermarket. Like meat. Like…”

“Patty—”

 _“You were gone!”_ she says, looking at him in a way he’s never seen before, that he recognizes, in stages, as anger. “I called your name, and you were gone! _You were_ **_gone!_** _”_

Another wave of cars descends on them, forgetting the lesson the previous batches had learned, and again, it takes a full light cycle to flush them out. Stan waits for the noise to pass, but Patty starts in on him before they’ve all gone.

“I talked to your friend. Beverly? I should’ve known not to accept any call that came through to your phone, but the strangest feeling came over me, Stan, and then I heard her voice, and I felt— I just felt— _so…”_

“Afraid?” he guesses, though it’s hardly a guess.

Her face goes white. She stares at him, forgetting her anger because her fear swallows it in one bite. She nods, and the light flicks red again.

“Beverly,” he says, remembering her bracelets and the fearless way she’d jumped ahead of them into the quarry, a whole entire lifetime ago. When they were children. “What did she say?”

“She— she asked after you.”

Stan nods, waiting for the rest, but that’s the end apparently. He supposes he can’t be surprised at that. They wouldn’t have let him have his phone on suicide watch anyway, and depending on the day, he wouldn’t have been able to keep a phone in his hands without bleeding all over it and himself.

“Oh,” he says, feeling bereft in a way he maybe doesn’t deserve.

Patty sniffles, dashes the tears from her eyes, and steps on the gas. Stan grabs the wheel, yelling her name, and a delivery truck races across the intersection. They breathe a single heavy sigh into the car. The light flicks green. Stan turns the hazards off.

“You really scared me, Stan,” she says, a few blocks later when they’re maybe five minutes away from the house.

“I’m sorry,” he says, meaning it every bit as much as he’s meant it the other times. Beneath the gauze bandages, his wrists itch violently. He laces his fingers together between his knees and bears it, willing his mind to conquer his flesh.

For her own part, Patty looks like she’s been hospitalized the entire time that he’s been detained. Her hair falls in a limp, unbrushed wave, and there are dark circles under her eyes. Not that she doesn’t look beautiful. She always looks beautiful, but he wishes this whole ordeal hadn’t been so hard on her. It’s painful to look at her and see the damage she’s absorbed into herself. He likes to think that if he could go back in time and conceive of a way to spare her that suffering, he would do it.

But there’s no going back. There’s no Better Plan. He did what felt right, what he thought would save his friends, and even through the pain and the terror, there had been a moment of glory. A moment, just one, of looking death in the face— looking _the clown_ in the face— and laughing at the waste of it all.

Such effort expended, and It lost. To them. To a bunch of Losers scared out of their minds.

So many dead children. So many little raincoats washed up bloody, no bodies to be found in the wreckage. Only keepsakes left behind. A staircase of souvenirs to keep It warm in the musty dark.

“—Stan?”

He hums, blinking back into the car with Patty, in the driveway in front of their little house. “Oh,” he says. “Thank you for bringing me home, Patty.”

“Stanley?” she calls, jumping out of the car when he does, looking nervous again.

“What is it, Patty?”

“Would you… just stay with me, for tonight? Don’t… don’t look at your phone. Don’t leave. I can’t… I couldn’t stand it if you left right now.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he promises, coming around to her door but leaving it between them. A casual barrier, just in case the thought of touching him and feeling a dead fish still makes her skin crawl. “But Patty…”

“No,” she says immediately, lip wobbling, understanding him straight away. “Stan, no. _Please.”_

“Patty,” he tries.

“No!” she shouts, closing her door and pointing at him. “No! The last time you talked to one of them, I had to drag you out of the bathtub with your wrists cut open! _No, Stan!_ _No!_ Do you hear me?” she screams, pounding his chest with her fist when he hugs her.

She doesn’t hit very hard, but one of the blows catches his still-healing bruise, enough to hurt.

He winces but doesn’t let go of her. She collapses against him, shuddering and crying silently. She feels very small in his arms.

“Patty, I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry,” he croons, petting her hair and doing his level best to soothe her. To give her some kind of relief from the terrible weight living inside her because of what he did, the image of him she must still see when she closes her eyes. “Honey, I’m so sorry. I hurt you, and I’m so sorry.”

“You hurt yourself,” she moans, shaking and clutching after him like she’s expecting him to disappear at any moment. “Why did you do it, Stanley? Why did you do that to yourself?”

He presses his mouth to her hair and realizes, when her hair sticks to his chin, that he’s crying.

“Patty, can we go inside? I won’t look at my phone, I won’t leave. Let’s just sit down and have some hot chocolate, and you can tell me what you did today, okay? How does that sound?”

She buries her face in his borrowed shirt, and this close, all he can see of her face is the worry lines in her forehead and a streak of tears glistening on her cheek. She takes a deep, choppy breath, and then a few more, until they begin to come smoother. When she looks up at him, her blue eyes are glassy and worried. The line of her mouth is firm, resolved.

“I’ll charge your phone for you, and… and you can look at your messages and whatever else you need to do,” she tells him, starting to falter, “but can we just— for tonight, can you…?”

“Yes,” he tells her. “I promise.”

“Okay. Are you— I know I can’t— _keep you,_ but…”

“Tonight you can,” he says, smiling small so she’ll smile back. “Let’s go. I wanna hear about all the trouble you’ve been getting into.”

She laughs, shaking her head, looking the same way she did when he teased her on their wedding day. When the camera flashes were going off from every direction, and she felt awkward and out of place in the taffeta gown her mother picked out for her that he swore looked fit for a queen, because it did. Because she was wearing it.

They go into the house and order takeout, and he stays up late with her reading up on all the vacation spots they’d been looking at, before. She tells him about the casserole the next door neighbor baked her, and how it smelled like feet but Patty just couldn’t bear to say so to poor Debra’s face. He’s inclined to agree on that front. He remembers the fruitcake she attempted the previous Christmas, before she knew they were Jewish, and it hadn’t been edible.

Nice woman, very kind. Lousy cook. Hardly her fault, though. People can’t choose what they’re made of. Or how they express it.

Stan feels just as strange as Patty does about him being in the bathroom by himself, so she sits on the toilet and reads one of her cheesiest romance novels to him over the spray of the shower. He towels off, changes into some of his own clothes, and sits with her on the couch until she falls asleep.

By then, his phone’s at a hundred percent battery life. He unplugs it, makes sure the volume’s down so he won’t wake her accidentally, and tabs through his notifications.

Voicemails from work, a few more missed calls, and—

And a group chat. He scrolls up to the top, trying to guess by area code, and then by diction, who the numbers belong to. His heartbeat thumps in his ears reading the line, _Oh im big dick Bill Denbrough! Ladies love me nd my silver tongue!_

Followed shortly after by, _your stage name is trashmouth Richie you don’t get to talk shit._

And, _Actually Eduardo i think u will find that i am the king of talking shit._ Leading into, _Ur pretty quick, Eds. Sure u havent been a lefty this whole time?_

_Hes using talk-to-text and youre about to get schooled, Rich. Friendly warning._

Stan stares at the procession of eggplant emojis filling up the answering text box. He blinks and keeps scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling. Soon it’s 5am and the sun’s coming up and his phone’s dead, but his heart is full.

Six numbers corresponding to six people he loves. All of them alive. All of them safe.

He plugs his phone back in, wakes Patty to move them upstairs, and sleeps till noon. When he tries to think of things he wants to do, he keeps remembering the beach from his dream of Eddie. The pink sunset, the baby turtles, the soundless tide.

He puts on shorts and a loose t-shirt, pockets his phone, and takes a day trip down to St. Simon’s Island.

It’s crowded, there’s beached kelp stinking up the air, and kids are running from seagulls, but it’s what he expected. He doesn’t know _where_ the other beach exists, but he knows he could walk the earth forever and never find it, and it’s a fact that’s easy to accept.

As beautiful as it was, and as serene as that vast, empty sea felt, even from the safety of the shore, the thought of someday returning to it ahead of his time—

Well, he isn’t eager to go back, that’s all. There’s a time and a place to be the bird picking an alligator’s teeth clean, and he understands well enough that just because they didn’t get eaten this time, doesn’t mean a place like that wouldn’t devour them whole some other time, if it felt so inclined.

He watches the ocean, keeping an eye on the heavy sun as it makes its steady plunge toward the horizon.

His phone buzzes in his pocket.

 _Just got shit-canned from this movie,_ it reads. _Someone pls tell me I’m cute & doing my best!_

That’s weird. He could swear he had that number pegged as Bill, but it doesn’t sound like him at all. Actually, it doesn’t sound like any of them. He breathes through the butterflies congregating in his stomach and hits call.

It rings and rings, and once he thinks it’s sure to go to voicemail, someone picks up, flustered and upset. But for all that, there’s something else in it, something intensely familiar.

_“Hello? Patty? I’m sorry, I’m so— I didn’t m-mean to bother you. I’m in the middle of a crisis at w-w-work, and my wife was just trying to help. You must be—”_

“Bill?”

He identifies it in the silence, stunned and complete, that answers him. That quality of voice Bill’s always had, that can only be concerned for other people and never for himself.

His silence persists, and it’s nothing at all like the stifled screams in limbo at the psych ward. Amazing, how much it all reminded him of being a kid in a world of grown ups who could only survive if they didn’t look right at the evil thing.

The same way Patty can’t look right at him for too long, after what he did. He doesn’t blame her for being scared. He just wishes she didn’t blame him either.

_“…Stan? Is that you?”_

He tips his head back and squints into the sunset. Rubbing the back of his neck, he murmurs, “It’s me,” through a smile. All of his nerves, owing to their lepidopterous nature, fly away. “Hey, Bill.”

 _“Oh, my God,”_ comes the choked reply. _“Oh, my God, you’re— Stan?_ ** _S-Stanley?_** _You’re alive? But—_ ** _oh, my G-God—_** _”_

Stan knows without needing to ask. He closes his eyes, thinking, _Oh, Patty._ Thinking, _Sweetheart, you didn’t._ But of course she must have.

 _No, Stanley can’t come to the phone right now, he’s dead,_ he can imagine her saying, and why wouldn’t they believe her? Placebos work for a reason. That had always been Mrs. K’s logic, hadn’t it? To protect Eddie at all costs, even if it meant caging him to keep him small.

“Bill,” Stan whispers, hearing a clattering on the other line and not knowing if the phone fell or if Bill did. “Bill, I’m okay. I promise.”

 _“Stan, I’m— I’m s-so…”_ he gasps out, crying more than he’s breathing, from the sound of it. _“I’m sorry. Y-y-you were al-l-lone, and I’m sorry. I’m s-sorry.”_

Stan scrubs his sleeve across his nose. His whole face seems to be wet, and it reminds him of the sewers, the last time in his life he’d really been alone the way Bill means it. No light, no sound, no warmth, no air. Just that thing, telling him by smothering him how it would feel in twenty-seven years to be forcefully admitted to a psychiatric hospital for opening his veins in a bathtub. Alone. Vulnerable. But that wasn’t what he felt, right at the end. That wasn’t it at all.

He’d been smiling. He’d been thinking, _I’m with you. I’m with you, and It can’t have you if It can’t have me. It can’t win if It can’t have all of us, but you’ll have me. You’ll always have me._

He’d been thinking, _I love you guys._

Because there hadn’t been room for anything else.

_“Stan, we would’ve c-come for you if— but we didn’t kn-know.”_

_“Bill? Why are you crying? Who’s on the phone?”_

_“My friend, Stan. Audra,”_ Bill says away from the phone. _“My b-best friend. I thought he was dead. I thought he k-killed himself. It’s what she told us…”_

Stan knew that had to have been what happened, but to hear it hurts. To hear that that’s what he fully intended to do, even to save them, hurts.

The next voice on the phone must be Audra’s because Stan doesn’t know it, except tangentially. In a way where he thinks he has heard her speak before, but not in any kind of way where he’d know her the way he knows Bill. She’s familiar, though. Like words to a song he can only remember the melody of.

_“Hi, Stan? My name’s Audra, I’m Bill’s wife. Congratulations on not being dead.”_

A laugh explodes in his chest, feeling like fireworks on the way out. He hasn’t laughed since… gosh, since Patty was throwing out ideas for their next vacation. The world has shifted on its axis since then.

He feels like he was half a person before Mike called, and now he’s something else. Something heavier but not worse for it. Just different. He says, “Thanks, Audra. I appreciate it.”

_“Let me talk to him.”_

_“Will you be okay if I leave you alone?”_

_“Yes. L-let me talk to him.”_

_“I’ve been voted off the island,”_ Audra announces in a dispassionate kind of voice Stan likes a lot. _“It was good to hear your voice, Stan.”_

Stan waits a few seconds, listening to the faint crackle of static as the phone changes hands. A ways from the speaker, a car door closes, and Stan finds himself smiling again. He muses, “I like her, Bill.”

 _“I do, too,”_ he huffs, and then, _“She’s out of m-my league.”_

“I noticed,” Stan answers glibly, warming at the laugh it earns him. He waits for that old laughter to taper off to add, “We could go back and forth forever being sorry, and I am sorry. I left you alone, too. But I want you to know, I forgive you. You don’t have to be sorry because I forgive you. Okay?”

Bill makes a sound into the phone, then the sound retreats. Maybe he’s covering the phone with his hand. He sighs roughly and says, pleading almost, _“Me, too. M-me, too.”_

“I didn’t have my phone, or I would’ve called. I’ve been in an institution since yesterday.”

_“What do you… Stan? W-w-what did you d-do?”_

His heart leaps up into his throat, eyes prickling painfully. The angry red lines in his wrists gaze up at him in open accusation, a constant harsh reminder of exactly what he did. He’d taken off his bandages so he wouldn’t get tan lines around them and so he could work on brightening up the sickly tone of his skin post-suicide watch, but he’s reconsidering that logic now.

They look so hateful against his pale, pale skin. He hadn’t noticed before.

_“Stan?”_

“Patty did find me in the bathtub, Bill. I’d— I’d slit both my wrists.”

That stunned silence makes a reappearance, and Stan hangs his head, ashamed. He didn’t do it to escape them, he did it to escape It. To give them a chance. Tears burst out of him, hot, streaming.

“I was in a regular hospital at first. I lost a lot of blood, but then I… kept bleeding no matter what the doctors did, so they thought I was finding ways to hurt myself, but I wasn’t, Bill. I wasn’t the one doing it.”

_“M-m-motherf-fucker found Henry B-Bowers in an institution, too. B-broke him out. Set him loose like a r-rabid dog. He went after Eddie, and Mike. Richie k-killed him.”_

Stan didn’t know about that part. He closes his hand in a fist around a mound of a sand, trying to breath. “But they’re all okay? I read your texts, I know you all made it out, but— is everyone okay, Bill?”

_“We’re okay… are you?”_

“Now that I’m not strapped down being fed pills every day? Yeah,” he says, making his voice just a touch brighter. He does feel better without the medication they were giving him. His first day home he felt like he was living inside of a cloud, but that feeling left him once he got some sleep. “I wanted to talk to you the whole time I was in there, but the only number I had was Mike’s at the library, and that just rang and rang. I think I must’ve missed you by then.”

 _“We had to go down to Bangor for Eddie,”_ Bill explains. _“The d-doctors had to amputate his arm. After…”_

Stan rubs at his arm where that strange bruise has lingered for much longer than any other bruise he’s ever gotten. “I know,” he says, rolling up the short edge of his sleeve to look at the imprint of it. Now that it’s started to yellow in places, he can make out the shape of the thing that got him. Ridges to denote teeth, arced in half moons that would fit the bear trap of Its jaw.

“This is going to sound crazy, but I think I was there when it happened. When It… bit him.”

_“That… doesn’t sound crazy to me. He told us he s-saw you. We j-just thought he m-m-meant the Deadlights.”_

“No, it was something else,” Stan tells him. He remembers how cold the Deadlights were, when that horrible thing attached itself to him like a nightmare out of Ridley Scott’s worst nightmare. “I saw him, and then my arm hurt like… like nothing I’d ever felt before. And there was a beach with no one but us, me and Eddie. There were turtles being born. We watched them crawling out into the ocean, and we thought we were dead.”

_“Did you say… turtles?”_

Stan blinks, confused that that’s the part Bill hangs off of. Until it sinks in for him why, and what he’s remembering. He laughs, having no other response.

He doesn’t wonder anymore where he and Eddie went, though, if pressed, he probably still couldn’t explain it. Had they been here all along? But in another time? Transported back to the apogee of creation?

Turtles heading out to sea, fresh out of their shells. Had they seen…?

_The Turtle couldn’t help us._

Maybe it doesn’t matter as much as all that. The turtles hadn’t stopped to look at them, after all, and if— _Maturin_ — had been there, he wouldn’t have been the one to break the mold and gawk. Not even if he could cross aeons and particles and dimensions on a whim.

Too much to do, boys. A whole universe to hold up. Tick, tock. Busy, busy.

He laughs again, and Bill laughs, too.

_“No hands, but he’s still got his f-fingers in everything, d-doesn’t he? Goddamn b-busybody. Had a bellyache, my ass.”_

Stan’s smile lingers on his face a while, and he watches the waves break beneath the hot sun. He looks down at his tanning arms and clicks his tongue at himself, realizing he forgot to bring sunscreen. “What a bizarre world we live in.”

Bill sighs on the other line, a thoughtful sound. _“It’s ours again and not—_ ** _Its_** _. Not ever again.”_

Pride so light and brilliant it might as well be sunshine fills up Stan’s chest. Pride and love and relief, all of it so vibrant it makes him feel what a week’s worth of Xanax and group therapy sessions couldn’t hold a candle to. He wipes at his eyes again. “I’m proud of you. I wish I had been there with you.”

_“You’re here now. Maybe you didn’t see it, but we f-felt you there the whole time. There was never a moment you weren’t with us, Stan. You made us— braver. Stronger.”_

“You were always brave, Bill, and strong. Stronger than the rest of us.”

_“Honestly, Stan, I… I only knew how to lead when it was for you guys. I don’t know. Everything to now’s been tainted by the fucking clown, and it’s all just falling apart.”_

“Well, then, what do you need to put it back together?” Stan asks gently, gazing down for a long moment at his scabbed wrists without really seeing them, until the patchwork stitching of sutures and crusted up blood whispers what he did. He whispers back, “I like puzzles,” and carefully doesn’t point out how Bill’s stutter has handily seen itself out. Maybe the last of what he needed to come back to himself, was this.

Hearing it from Stan that the Lucky Seven were still seven. And that he’s every bit as brave as they always knew him to be.

 _“If I could have a fresh start,”_ Bill murmurs, already sinking into the makings of a winning strategy, though he doesn’t sound like he knows it yet. _“Wipe the slate clean, start writing. Don’t let up until I have something I’m proud of. And everything else can just go.”_

Stan hums thoughtfully, turning his hand over where the skin’s unmarred and a deep bronze from all the sun he’s gotten today. He nods to himself. “Yeah,” he says, “I think you’re right.”

_“Stan, have you… have you called anyone else? Do the others know?”_

“No, you’re the first. Patty didn’t want me to call any of you. I mean, from her point of view, I did it because Mike called, and that’s not— I didn’t know how to tell her that wasn’t why.”

Bill makes a thoughtful sound, and then, softly, asks, _“Why did you do it?”_

“I thought It would find a way to use me against you, and then I thought… maybe It _needed_ to use me against you, and that if I didn’t go, if It couldn’t have all of us… then maybe It couldn’t win.”

 _“Losers stick together, Stan,”_ Bill tells him, quietly, confidently. _“We stick together.”_

Stan nods, and then for Bill’s benefit, he says, “I know.” He sighs, adding, “God, I can’t— I didn’t think I’d get the chance to talk to you again, Bill. I’m… I’m glad. You sound the same.”

Bill groans, embarrassed. _“My stutter, I know.”_

“I meant the way you talk. You haven’t stuttered in a few minutes now,” Stan reminds him.

 _“I got rid of it for a long time, but then… and now I’m off this production,”_ he grunts unhappily.

“Oh, right,” Stan says, remembering. He makes his voice as flat as it goes. “You’re cute, and you’re doing your best.”

Bill laughs, only surprised now. There’s a tapping sound like he’s checking the notifications on his phone, and Stan thumbs over to the group chat, too, watching the responses roll in. It’s mostly Richie popping back at Eddie for being the first one to reply the way Stan had.

A conspiratorial edge creeps into Bill’s voice. _“Hey, how were you gonna tell them anyway?”_

Stan changes the phone to his other ear, beginning to smile. “What did you have in mind?”

 _“It’s all in the timing, Stan,”_ he says, and his smile is audible, and contagious. _“It’s all in the timing.”_

Big Bill, back to his scheming. Stan’s got no right feeling safe and at home in the middle of it, but he does. He listens to Bill talk on the other line, all the kinks smoothed out of his voice so he sounds self-assured and strong, how they’ve always known him best. Stan lies back on the sand, squinting against the sun, happy and warm. 

Loved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have some water, lovely. <3


	3. Blessing, NY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie serves up divorce papers and makes a surprising new friend. <3

The Bookers in the Bar

“Sorry to bug you, man,” Eddie says with his shoulder holding the phone up to his mouth, so he can have his hand free to hold all his shit. His umbrella for when it rains later and his coat for when the temperature inevitably drops after the rain cools everything down and the divorce papers for when he sees Myra. “I know you’re taking on the Grand Canyon today.”

 _“You’re not bugging me! I saw it this morning,”_ Mike says cheerfully. _“I read online that it’s best to try and catch it at sunrise, and I guess I don’t have anything to compare it to, but it was really something. I’m just in town for lunch, and then I’ll be in the mountains for an all-day hike. I’m glad you caught me, Eddie. What’s on your mind?”_

“Um,” he sighs, cursing when he forgets his balancing act to shrug, and he sacrifices everything else to catch the phone. “Damn it.”

_“Eddie? Are you okay?”_

“Yeah,” Eddie grumbles, kneeling and shouldering his phone again to pick up all his things. He thinks about standing, looks at where he is, and walks over to a nearby park bench to drop everything and then himself onto it. “I’m about to go see Myra.”

_“Oh. You’ve got the paperwork ready to go already?”_

“I had my lawyer prepare everything back when I was stuck in Bangor. Is that awful of me? Should I wait a while? I haven’t seen her since you called.”

 _“If you wait, will you sit on it for a while and talk yourself out of it?”_ Mike asks carefully.

Eddie bites his cheek to keep the denial at bay, and then he lets himself honestly consider the question. “She might talk me out of it,” he murmurs, “if I don’t.”

_“Is that what you want?”_

“No,” he answers right away. He’s at least sure of that much.

_“Then I think you need to take it to her now. It’s the only honest thing you can do.”_

Eddie supposes that’s true. He could walk around for a month or two pretending he doesn’t have the papers in his suitcase, but that won’t do anything except stir his own impatience and resentment, and as it stands, he’s too anxious to be either of those things.

“I just want it to be over with,” he admits. “But it’s not… I know it’s not gonna be as easy as walking in there and asking her to sign. She’ll— it’s gonna drag on, and— and she’ll talk to me like I’m the same, but I’m different, Mike.”

_“You’re who you were always meant to be, Eddie. We’re all trying to be who we were meant to be. You can’t be the one standing in your own way anymore.”_

“But what if… what if I believe her, Mike? _I don’t,_ and I don’t _want to,_ but what if I do?”

Mike hums, and on his end of the line, there’s a sound of footsteps and a door opening. The intermittent ambience of a big room full of people dissipates, and then it’s just the silence and Mike. He says, _“What if you convinced yourself of something else first? Fill the spot where that belief would go, with something you want to believe in?”_

“Like what?” Eddie says, layering his coat over his lap when a chill pricks up in the air.

 _“Something absurd, and then something real,”_ he declares.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

Laughing, Mike tells him, _“Have you ever heard of the door-to-face method, Eddie?”_

“It’s when you suggest something outrageous that people will never agree to so they’ll be softened up for a more modest request,” Eddie rambles off, and sits up straighter. “Oh.”

 _“So tell yourself something crazy. Something like, I need this divorce because astronauts can’t go to the moon if they have families waiting for them at home, and I can’t_ **_not_ ** _go to the moon!”_

“That’s actually ridiculous,” Eddie groans, laughing. “I like it.”

 _“Now you de-escalate it,”_ Mike prompts.

“Uhh, I need this divorce because I… can’t…?” He lifts the phone off his shoulder and looks around at the park. His mommy— _God_ — _his_ _mother_ never would’ve brought him anywhere like it as a kid. Way too many germs just between the pigeons and the mutated subway rats bigger than chihuahuas. To say nothing of the many homeless milling about or the pollution or the turnstiles a thousand people rub their sweaty bodies against just to get anywhere in New York.

Didn’t it kind of always fly in the face of what his mother taught him, that he chose a busy, noisy, dirty, overcrowded city to live in? He could’ve gone to Nebraska or New Mexico or Iowa, someplace with big open skies and mountains or cornfields and snowdrifts, but he chose a concrete jungle of claustrophobic traffic jams and monuments rubbed brassy yellow by a million sets of hands. Someplace he could step outside and instantly become anonymous, where he’d have to be moving constantly to keep his head above water, to keep himself going. It was hell on Myra’s nerves, but for him it was invigorating.

 _“Maybe try an affirmation instead of a negation,”_ Mike suggests tenderly. _“Instead of saying you can’t, say you can. I need this divorce_ ** _so I can_** _go to the moon.”_

“I don’t want to go to the moon,” Eddie blurts out, frustrated. He tips his head back to look up at the trees of Central Park. “I just… I want what you have, Mike. I want to be able _to go_ and for no one to hold me back.”

There’s a moment, a long one, of quiet. Then Mike tells him, _“You can say you want to be free, Eddie.”_

“But that’s so dramatic.”

 _“Eddie, you are dramatic,”_ he says fondly. _“Wanting to be in charge of your own life and your own happiness, though? Wanting other people to be in charge of theirs? Those are fair things to want. You don’t have to be sorry about that, and believe me, I know how it feels when people give you that look that makes you feel like you’re all hollowed out inside, but you can’t trust that feeling. You’re not empty. You’re not worthless. It’s them, or else they wouldn’t waste their whole lives trying to convince you it’s the other way around.”_

Eddie squeezes the phone so hard it bites into the meat of his thumb. He ducks his head.

 _“And you know I know what I’m talking about,”_ Mike tells him. _“Only black kid in Derry, remember?”_

“I don’t think you were _the_ _only one,”_ Eddie says, starting to smile. And then, quieter, “I know you’re right, though.”

 _“Damn right I am. All right, say it back to me. Your modest request,”_ Mike reminds him.

“I need this divorce so I can… be free,” he mumbles.

_“Good. Now say it again, but mean it.”_

Eddie gets his feet underneath him so he’s grounded and takes a breath. He says, “I need this divorce so I can be free.”

_“And what does it mean to you, to be free?”_

“Mike,” Eddie grouses, “that’s not part of it.”

 _“Think of it like planting roots or digging down a few feet to install a fence,”_ Mike explains patiently. _“Beliefs are like buildings. They’ll come right down if they don’t have a strong foundation. So tell me what freedom means to you. Don’t second guess it, just say the first thing you think of.”_

“Deciding for myself,” Eddie stammers out. He shakes his head, shrugging to himself. “Only being afraid if I’m really afraid, and not just because someone else tells me to be.”

 _“Affirmations, Eddie,”_ Mike coaxes.

He remembers what Richie said to him in the sewers and grits out, “Being— _brave.”_

 _“Yes, Eddie!”_ he says, ramping up the energy. _“What else?”_

“Trusting my own judgement…”

_“To do what?”_

_“To go after what I want!”_

Eddie shudders into the answering silence. He takes the phone away from his ear to press the back of his wrist to his mouth. Some tourists taking pictures by the big rocks shoot him nervous glances, but anyone who’s been in New York longer than a day doesn’t even look up. He catches his breath and lifts the phone back to his ear.

_“—there, Eddie?”_

“I’m here,” he rushes to say, still a little breathless. “Sorry, Mike.”

 _“For what?”_ Mike crows happily. _“That was awesome! I’m proud of you. You’ve got this, okay? You know you’ve got it.”_

“I do?”

_“Yes. You know what you want, you know why you want it, and you’re not gonna back down until you get it. Right?”_

Eddie nods, dazed, still a simmering kind of stunned at himself and at the strength of his own voice. He remembers a second later that Mike can’t see him and stumbles over himself to say, “Y-yeah, I’m— I’m not gonna back down.”

_“Just remember how that felt, and you’ll do fine. Okay?”_

Eddie nods again. “Okay, Mike.”

 _“You got this, Eddie,”_ he tells him again. _“You’re gonna be fine.”_

“Okay,” he says, feeling lighter and held tight at the same time. “Okay. Thanks, Mike.”

_“Anytime. Well— I won’t have service for the next couple of hours, probably. But I’m always here, Eddie. The others, too. Losers stick together, right?”_

“Yeah. Yeah, we stick together. Okay. Okay, I can do it. Go climb your mountain or whatever. I’ll talk to you after, and… and everything’ll be how we want it. Because we made it that way.”

_“That’s what I like to hear.”_

“Bye, Mikey.”

_“Bye, Eddie. Good luck.”_

Eddie sits on the bench another fifteen minutes before gathering up his things and making the trek back to the apartment. The dread sinks its claws back into him, but he just keeps telling himself what Mike said. He keeps telling himself what _he_ said, that he can’t go to the moon unless he’s unencumbered, that he can’t be brave if he allows other people to tell him he’s not, that he has to be free to go after what he wants.

In the cab crossing 42nd Street, he tries to think about what he really does want. Yeah, to choose. To believe that he can. To believe _in himself._ To make mistakes and to be foolish and to be excited, about all of it.

The cab lets him out at his building, and Eddie looks the long way up at their window from the curb. His phone rings in his pocket and jerks his elevated heartbeat into a gallop.

“Hello?”

_“Eddie? Why didn’t you tell me as soon as you got back into town? Are you hurt? Why are you wearing a sling? Do you need pain meds? You must have a prescription. I’ll get it filled for you, Eddie, sweetheart. The CVS around the corner stays open late, I’m sure they’ll have it ready for you by the end of the day.”_

He swallows hard into the silence once it finally looms up between them.

_“Eddie? Well, don’t just stand there. Come up! I’ll buzz you in. Did you know it’s supposed to rain today? You don’t want to get caught in a downpour this time of year. Look at you. You aren’t wearing the right shoes for rain. You’ll soak right through, but at least you have a coat. Eddie, really, you’ll catch a chill standing on the sidewalk like that. You better hurry on up and I’ll make you some soup. Okay? I’ll see you in a minute.”_

The line beeps, and he stares at the blank screen for a while, not quite knowing what it is he expects to find there. In his idleness, he catches sight of his eyes in the dim reflection, and then he sees the rest of his face, grim and worried. Determined.

It lights up a second later with a text from Richie. He opens it.

**Trashmouth**  
do u think all toilet humor is bad, or is  
some of it redeemable? asking for a friend

Eddie blinks at the question and scrolls up to confirm that, yes, Richie sent it to their private conversation. He taps his thumb over the keyboard, but a text from Myra blocks him, and he opens it by mistake.

**Myra**  
Eddie, come upstairs. I’m waiting to buzz you in.

He rubs the back of his hand over his forehead vigorously as if it’ll scrub out his building headache. He remembers that if Myra’s not actively stationed by the door, she’ll be at the window watching him, and he ducks under the awning for cover. He goes to tap out a reply for Richie, a brush-off, something random and bitchy, but then his eyes catch on the scrunched, too-close skyline of New York City boxing him into this moment, and his mind stalls.

Back when he was a tourist himself and he’d been ravenous for all the city’s culture and the characters within its stories, there was this comedian he read into with some pretty solid material. He’d liked it, and there’d been a joke about toilet humor, he’s pretty sure.

Myra thought the guy was obscene, but that had been the point a lot of the time, and Eddie had enjoyed the social commentary. He remembers thinking he couldn’t believe there hadn’t been a present day renaissance for the guy’s comedy. How did that joke go? How dirty _is_ your toilet? What was the guy’s name?

**Eddie**  
Lenny Bruce

The doorman holds the door for Eddie and studiously helps him gather up his things when they scatter at a badly timed bump of his one elbow on the doorframe.

 _“Ow,_ fuck.”

“Mr. Kaspbrak, good lord,” he says, noticing his arm.

“Oh, it’s fine, Gio. Honestly,” Eddie insists, shaking out his stung elbow because he can’t just fucking rub it. His phone buzzes in his pocket, and he digs it back out.

**Trashmouth**  
ohhhhh ya the dirty toilet bit NICE

Eddie smirks at the text and presses his back to the wall so he’ll be out of the way of the doors.

**Eddie**  
What kind of new yorker would I be if I didn’t know Lenny Bruce

 **Richie**  
A kid from Maine lol ;)

He takes one more long moment to grin at their brief, stupid exchange before he takes his stuff back from Gio and makes his way to the elevators. His phone buzzes again, and he keeps smiling until he looks at it and sees that it’s from Myra.

**Myra**  
Eddie are you coming up?

 **Eddie**  
Yes the doorman let me in. Like he usually does.

He gets off on their floor, and no sooner than the bell over the sliding doors ding, does he hear a door down the hall bang open.

“Eddie! You had me so worried, I—” And no sooner than she lays eyes on him does she start wailing. “Eddie! Oh! Your arm! Your poor dear arm!”

“Myra,” he hisses, rushing over to beg her to stop, but seeing him spring into action only upsets her further. “Myra, I’m fine. Look! See? Please stop screaming. Myra!”

“How can you say you’re fine!” she shrieks, and good God, he thought he knew how bad this was going to be, but she hasn’t been this upset since he rolled his ankle two summers ago at a charity golf tournament he’d been forced to attend for work.

“Myra, the neighbors—”

And sure enough, the door across the hall from them swings open.

“Hi, Mrs. Castillo. I’m sorry we—”

“Eddie, come with me, and I’ll fix you right up!” Myra soothes, as if he’s the one who was being hysterical just a second ago.

“Mr. Kaspbrak, are you all right?” sweet little Mrs. Castillo calls daintily, but Eddie doesn’t get the chance to answer before he’s hauled into the apartment.

He drops everything, again, and before he can say anything in his defense, Myra crouches to get his things together. She hesitates when she sees the papers, all clipped loosely together but a little ruffled from hitting the ground so many times.

“Eddie? What is this?”

“Myra, I—”

“Divorce? You want a divorce? Eddie? How could you do this to me? How could you want to leave? What we have is so perfect. We’re perfect, Eddie.”

She starts to cry, and Eddie presses his lips together. He hates it when she’s upset like this, and he hates to be the reason for the tears on her face. He did this to her every bit as much as he did it to himself, and really, the unintended cruelty of it, stings. Because he knows it’s his own fucked up trauma that caused her life to be so pitted into his.

He ruined her, that’s what he did. He cut himself off at the knees and cursed himself to a stunted life that he hates, and he took her with him. If he could just help her see it the way he does, as something that’s keeping them stuck and not letting them grow, then maybe he can get her to understand.

“What do you really think is perfect about this, Myra?”

“What do you mean?” she asks, tears streaming and smearing her makeup.

“What about this appeals to you? Why do you want us to stay together?” he asks, trying to find that calm, steady, horse-whisperer voice Mike used on him. “Have you ever thought about that? Have you ever asked yourself why you actually love me?”

“What kind of question is that?” she asks, face scrunching up and turning a bright pink. “Eddie, what kind of question is that?”

“I’m just asking if you know what it is that you love about me. You say it often enough, but—” He recalls Mike’s voice like a protective talisman. “But… what does it mean to you? That you love me?”

“You’re not making any sense, Eddie,” she whimpers. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, who am I to you? Myra, just stop for a second, okay? This is important.”

“You’re— well, you’re my little Eddie. You’re everything to me, Eddie, you know that. You know you’re everything to me.”

“What does that mean!” he says, voice creeping in volume, rising in frustration. “What does that mean, Myra? What does it mean to be _everything_ to someone else? How can I have anything left for myself if I’m everything to you?”

She stares at him, amazed, and he hears it then, before she can try to feed it to him, that she’s supposed to be his everything, too. He doesn’t even know where to begin with that. Doesn’t know how to tell her he doesn’t want anyone to protect him from the world. Doesn’t know how to tell her that he never did. How can he say that to her, when he wanted it enough, once, to marry her in the first place? How is that fair to her?

He knows he can’t take all the blame. He knows that. Even if she didn’t know she was tying on concrete shoes and jumping into a lake by marrying him, she knew what she was looking for when she picked him. Just as much as he knew what she was when he picked her.

“But Eddie,” she says, inconsolable, “you like it when I take care of you.”

“No, I don’t. _I don’t!_ It makes me feel like I’m thirteen and I can’t breathe without my aspirator, _but it doesn’t even do what I think it does!”_

“Do you need your inhaler, Eddie?” she asks, jumping to her feet.

“No, Myra. Myra, can you please sit for a minute?”

“You just aren’t making any sense, Eddie. Are you warm? Do you need a compress for your neck?” She holds the back of her hand to his forehead, tsking. “You feel warm. I’ll get you some Tylenol.”

“Myra, stop. I don’t need anything. I don’t— I mean, that’s just it! I don’t need anything, I’m fine on my own, and I want to get back to that. I want to be _enough_ on my own. Because _I am_ enough.”

“You can’t mean that, Eddie,” she moans, wiping at the smudged mascara staining her cheeks. “What will I do without you?”

“Myra, I’m… I’m sorry. But that’s what I’m talking about. I can’t be your crutch anymore. Just like you can’t be mine. And I know I asked you to be, I know we brought it out in each other, I know it’s what we wanted, for years, but I don’t want that anymore.” He waits, trying to let that sink in for her. “I want to be my own person, don’t you? Don’t you want your life _to be yours?_ Don’t you want to live? I want to live, Myra. I want to… I want to do everything I thought I was afraid of. Because I’m not afraid of it. I never was.”

She starts crying again, and Eddie looks away, crouching instead to retrieve the papers from where they’re lying on the floor. That wakes her up, and she shrieks at him to stop, flailing at his shoulders, possibly forgetting at this angle that he’s at a serious disadvantage.

His arm screams fire all across his back and up the side of his neck. He yells out, too. It sparks pain in his cheek under the smaller bandage they gave him at the hospital in Bangor. He doesn’t think his stitches pop, but Jesus, it hurts.

“Myra, stop! You’re hurting me! Myra!”

“Oh, Eddie,” she gasps, tearing herself away from him, but remembering, at his bitten off hiss, to be gentle. She heaves a juddering sigh, crying again. “Eddie, I’m sorry. I’m sorry! I just— I just want to be what you need. Aren’t I always what you need, Eddie? I take care of you. I love you. I love you, Eddie!”

“I don’t need to be taken care of,” he grits out, squeezing his bicep near the shoulder to try and soothe the ache without putting more pressure closer to the cut and the— his stump, to just call it what it is. He takes a shuddering breath, hearing what he just said to her, and imagines his feet like the roots to a hundred year old tree. He remembers Mike’s advice and turns his negation into an affirmation. “I can take care of myself.”

They stare at each other, and there’s a timid knock at the door.

“Who is it?” he calls out, surprised at the stripped quality to his voice.

“Mr. Kaspbrak?” Mrs. Castillo calls out through the door, and then, making every effort to be louder, though she doesn’t exactly succeed, she says, “Nate from Security is here to speak to you, Mr. Kaspbrak.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he mutters, going to get the door.

It’s not locked, so he just pulls it right open. The really tall, really jacked, really tan security guy, Nate, who Eddie has never checked out once, not ever, stands a polite distance away from Mrs. Castillo. His looming, although daunting as ever, looks mildly contrite, next to her. Deferential. He’s got his arms crossed over his chest and a neutral expression on his face.

“Mr. Kaspbrak?” he murmurs, with a voice like thunder, that _doesn’t_ make Eddie weak in the knees. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, of course, why? Oh, uh,” he laughs, gesturing behind him with difficulty, being that he does it with his amputated arm and it’s swaddled against his body in a sling so as to prevent him from doing stupid things, like gesturing with it. He clutches that arm near the shoulder where it’s generally safer to squeeze, wincing painfully at his own stupidity. “Uh— I mean, I had an— that’s, I’m recovering from a— freak accident. It’s not a big deal.”

“Sorry to hear that, but that’s really not what I meant,” Nate says gruffly. He waves his hand across his own face, and when that doesn’t help Eddie figure out what he’s asking, he adds, “The waterworks, Mr. Kaspbrak?”

He blinks, and feeling how his eyelashes stick together, he touches his face. “Oh.”

“Mr. Kaspbrak, do you need help leaving the apartment?” Mrs. Castillo asks in a tiny, fragile voice.

“ _Oh._ No, Mrs. Castillo, no,” he says, trying to laugh, but it comes out all wrong. He flaps his hand vaguely. “No, everything’s— _everything’s fine,_ I promise.”

“All the same,” Nate drones. “Just wanted to pop in and check. You don’t have any objections to that, do you, ma’am?”

Eddie glances back at Myra. She’s stepped behind the kitchen bar so as to be less exposed, but people have always made her nervous. She answers his question in a vague, mumbled voice but doesn’t make any further attempt to acknowledge him or Mrs. Castillo.

“Mr. Kaspbrak, if you could step outside for just a moment?” Nate says in a clear, almost jovial kind of voice that’s impossible to take issue with. “I just want to remind you of our policy concerning noise complaints. Won’t take but a second.”

“Um. Okay?”

Eddie steps outside, and Nate reaches beside him to pull the door neatly closed. Mrs. Castillo looks between them nervously, looking like she desperately want to say something, but it’s Nate who says it.

“ _Do_ you need help leaving the apartment, Mr. Kaspbrak?”

“What? No, I don’t! It’s not like that,” he says, a little desperately, trying to laugh again and still missing the mark. He wipes quickly at his face, remembering that he must look like a complete disaster. “Mrs. Castillo—”

“Mrs. Castillo, I’ve got it from here,” Nate cuts in smoothly, making the timber of his voice so much lighter and sweeter when it’s her.

She smiles at him and pats his huge tattooed arm with her wrinkled little old lady hand, completely appeased and not at all intimidated. “Such a nice boy,” she says, and then she turns to Eddie. “You’ve got friends here, Mr. Kaspbrak. Don’t you forget it.” She pats his cheek, the one that didn’t have a knife go through it, and turns to go back to her apartment.

Nate waits for her to close her door before honing in on Eddie again. His voice comes out softer so he won’t be heard through the door. “Talk to me straight, man. You need help? There’s no shame in it if you do.”

Eddie shuts his mouth when he realizes it’s been hanging open he doesn’t know how long.

“Look. Ed, right? I’m gonna be right here no matter what. That’s S.O.P. for domestics, but you wanna leave the door open so I can see you, or you want me following you around while you put a bag together, I got no problem with that.”

“Is _that_ S.O.P.?” Eddie asks faintly.

“It is when I think somebody might get hurt otherwise, and seeing as I heard you say she was hurting you from all the way down by the elevators, I’m thinking it applies here. So what’s it gonna be?”

Eddie sighs from the depths of himself and thinks of the divorce papers on the floor. He doesn’t want to strong arm Myra into signing them, but he also doesn’t particularly want her to grab him again. Not that it was as bad as Nate or Mrs. Castillo are thinking, but he still appreciates knowing he doesn’t have to do this whole thing entirely alone.

“Can I just leave the door cracked? If you’re gonna be here anyway?”

“Fine by me.”

“Okay, I’m— I don’t plan on staying. I’ll try not to keep you too long.”

“You just let me worry about that, and Mr. Kaspbrak?”

Eddie stops himself from opening the door. He looks wearily over at Nate.

“You got this,” he says, serious as a heart attack.

It must be true, for him and Mike to tell him the same thing when there’s no way they could have coordinated it beforehand. Eddie smiles, rubs at his cheek where the tears are still on the tacky side, and turns the handle.

“Myra?” he calls out, walking back into the apart and leaving the door cracked like he said he would. “Mrs. Castillo left. Where are you?” He sees her at the window where she must’ve been standing when she saw him climb out of his taxi. He backtracks to the kitchen to scoop up the divorce papers, speaking up so she’ll hear him from the living room. “Myra, I really need you to sign these. I’m not changing my mind.”

No response. His phone buzzes in his pocket, and he checks it, just to distract himself from the pounding in his skull.

**Bev**  
Mike let us all know you were gonna need emotional support,  
Eddie. Are you holding up okay? Do you need anything?

 **Eddie**  
Still trying to get the papers signed. stand by

 **Bev**  
You can do it, Eddie. We’re all here for you.

Bev’s words reach him like a breath of fresh air or a cool touch of water. He’s glad for that. Every once in a while, when the other thing is what he remembers about her first, a bolt of dread uncurls in his belly and his hands sweat, but only every once in a while.

He knows none of them are exactly the worst thing they’ve ever done. They’re not the best thing either. They’re just something in the middle, the ricochet from the initial impact and the ripples left behind, the lesson learned and the story told from the weird amalgamation of scars they wear, seen or unseen.

It’s like Mike told him. They’re all just trying to settle into who they were always meant to be.

“So that’s it,” Myra says coldly right at his shoulder. “Why didn’t you just say there’s someone else, Eddie?”

For one wild, inexplicable moment, he thinks of Richie and his many typos and his tendency to overuse the eggplant emoji.

Then he realizes it’s not their innocuous conversation about toilet humor that Myra saw. Not Richie’s winky face or his habit of calling Eddie every single affectionate pet name he can think of just to get out of using the name everyone’s allowed to use. Not Richie’s messy hair and drunk grin from that night at the Chinese restaurant.

It’s Bev and her smiling, lovely face, asking him if he needs anything.

“What— _no,_ _Myra_. Oh, my God, Bev’s like—” _my mom,_ he almost says, except she’s not, at all.

It’s Myra that’s like his mom. Cue the laugh track, right. Oedipus fucking Rex.

He’s not in any rush to gouge his eyes out or anything, but he can kinda see the logic. The migraine terrorizing his brain might ease up if he didn’t have eyes for the tension to sink into.

“She’s like my sister, if I had one. I don’t know. It’s not like that, Myra. She’s my friend. My best friend.”

“Well, you’ve never mentioned her, and she doesn’t _look_ like a friend.”

“What do you want from me?” he lashes back, irritated, skin prickling all over at the implication that Bev is anything to him but exactly what she is, especially given— what happened. “Do you want that to be the reason I’m leaving? Because it’s not, but if there _has_ _to be_ someone else _,_ then you should know their name isn’t _Beverly_ ,” he says, heart hammering hard enough to break through his breastbone. _“It’s Richard!”_

 _“Oh, shit!”_ Nate bellows from the door.

Myra’s face turns white. She glances at the door and then at him, pressing her lips together until those turn white, too. If there’s something she wants to say to him that’s too ugly for polite company, he’ll proudly say a little more for her and for Nate. Because what he has to say _isn’t_ _ugly_. Isn’t shameful. Isn’t wrong.

Because it’s not like they’ve— because _they_ _haven’t_ — but, well—

Well…

 _Well,_ Eddie could’ve probably gone his whole life never even considering it, but now that he’s thinking about it, it seems obvious. The long, steady way they’d looked at each other that first time across the gap of years and choices _and fear_. That curious swell of delight, always, when it’s Richie, just Richie, as much as he loves every one of the Losers.

It’s different when it’s Richie. It’s been different for as long as he can remember.

“His name’s Richard,” he whispers, breathing heavily and shaking like a leaf. “But he goes by Richie.”

“ _No,_ I don’t believe you.”

“Believe it! I want this, Myra. I want to go. _I’m done,_ and I want to go, _so I’m going._ Just as soon as you sign these papers.”

Myra gives him a _look,_ a delicate, syrupy kind of look he’s seen before. She croons, “Eddie,” whisper soft. Everything about her goes whisper soft. “You won’t make it without me. It’s dirty and loud _and ugly_ out there.” Eyes glinting, she adds, half a warning and half a promise, “Especially for boys like you.”

“Good thing I’m not a boy then,” he tells her, made of stone just as much as he knows how to be. He’s been here before, he knows what her next move is.

“But Eddie, your arm…”

 _“Don’t,”_ he snaps, feeling his feet land solidly underneath him and grow roots.

He’s lived this exact moment, his arm in a cast way back before his growth spurt, the hospital and his mother and her attempt to keep his friends from seeing him. There had been something in him that day that he’d always had. Something he’d let himself forget because forgetting was easier and didn’t weigh as heavily as remembering did. But he remembers now. He remembers.

“I lost my arm, Myra. That’s _all_ I lost. I’ll be _fine_. You’re going to be fine, too. But only if I go. You need to let me go.”

A look of hurt crosses her face, followed quickly after by contempt so cold and self-sustaining, it’s no wonder she’s gone this long actually wanting him to need her. For a long time, he stares back at her, wondering what it is she sees in him. Wondering if it’s any different from what she’s always seen when she looks at him. And then, like a spell breaking, she flinches and looks away.

“I’m sorry, Eddie.”

He stays where he is, uncertain. He’s never seen this part of the argument before.

“Eddie,” she says, sounding more confused than upset. “I’m sorry,” she says again, in a small voice.

“Okay. It’s okay, Myra. Just…” he sighs. God, he’s tired. “Just sign the papers, Myra. Please.”

She nods, and he can see in the red creeping up her neck and across her nose that she’s ashamed. The way she talks to him, he’s never met her with resistance. He’s never pushed back, never stood up to her, never met that disparaging edge to her voice with unbending silence. Even to him, it sounds empty. Hollowed out.

It’s her first time properly hearing the way she talks to him, and it’s her first time feeling— chastised, and apologetic. She signs the papers.

Eddie double- and triple-checks for every signature and every set of initials. He can’t do this again, and he doesn’t think she can either. He stuffs the folder into his bag. “Thank you,” he says, feeling a weight come off his chest.

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” she says again, still looking lost.

“I’m sorry, too, Myra,” he says. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault, too, and I’m sorry.”

Myra doesn’t follow him into the bedroom where he upends a drawer and half the medicine cabinet into a duffle bag. She doesn’t call after him when he does his awkward one-handed dance with his bags at the door. Nate pushes it open after a second, grinning.

“Dude,” he says, holding his hand up for a high five.

Eddie makes a face at him and pulls the door tightly shut behind him. _Then_ he high fives him.

“Gimme that,” Nate growls— not in an angry way, but just in a way where that’s kind of what his voice sounds like naturally— and scoops Eddie’s bags off his shoulder. “My shift ended ten minutes ago. I’m taking you out for drinks.”

Eddie follows him to the elevators and slumps against the wall across from the doors. “Holyshit… Wait, if you were about to be off, why did you help me?”

“Thought I might get to throat punch a wife beater.” He cracks his knuckles. “What the hell else is this job good for?”

Eddie covers his face with his hand. He doesn’t mean to find that so funny, it’s kind of a terrible thing to laugh at, but jeez, this isn’t what he expected. “Can I rent you out to my friend Beverly? Her ex could do with having his jaw wired shut for a while.”

Nate laughs and scrubs his hand over Eddie’s hair in that rowdily affectionate way huge guys all seem to have in common. “Man, you really do gotta look out for the quiet ones.”

They end up outside in the rain, and Nate hails them a cab while Eddie looks all the way up the side of his building, craning his neck back and blinking hard against the droplets that get him right in the eye.

“Holy shit,” he breathes, letting himself be ushered into the back of the pale green boro taxi that pulls over for them. “Holy shit,” he mutters again, fumbling with his seatbelt. “Holy shit,” he summarizes to the big ass tumbler Nate slides in front of him. _“Holy shit,”_ he coughs into his elbow when the stuff goes down like fucking kerosene. That’s fine for his purposes.

He’d tried to order something off the happy hour menu, but Nate had said two words to the bartender and she’d given them a whole bottle of this hazmat shit to split between them. Eddie sucks down what he’s poured and gets a second while he’s at it, and then a third.

It’s not loud in the bar, but it does take him a while to realize what that metallic tinkling he keeps hearing is. He looks down, and his ring winks up at him. Eddie’s soused enough that he doesn’t think anything of popping his finger in his mouth and working the ring off with his teeth. He spits it out so it lands in a shimmying wobble on the divorce papers, right over the bottom line where he signed his name.

“You’re kind of a freak, ain’t ya, Ed?” Nate muses, tossing back an ungodly amount of booze and not reacting to it at all.

“You actually really have no idea, Nate.”

He throws his head back and cackles, and Eddie cracks a smile, too. It is pretty funny, isn’t it? This whole situation. And holy fuck, he really said— he told Myra he—

“Shit,” he says, digging into his pocket for his phone. “I can’t believe I did that.”

“Which part?” Nate asks on a belch. He plucks deftly at the tie holding his tasteful man bun together and bunches his hand in his hair a few times to get it sitting comfortably. It hangs down past his shoulders in a loose wave.

“Threw Richie in her face like he’s my boyfriend or something,” Eddie hiccups drunkenly, dropping his phone on the bar top. He burps, too. “Fuck.”

“Wait, so you’re _not_ boning the guy?” He pounds Eddie twice on the back. “Well, shit. Sounded true from where I was standing. Sure you don’t actually want to?”

“Well…” Eddie’s fingers stall over his keyboard. “I don’t know—”

His phone buzzes in his hands. He looks down at it dumbly while Nate reads over his shoulder.

**Trashmouth**  
I was just thinkin about u <3

“The fuck is a trashmouth?”

“Richie’s a trashmouth,” Eddie slurs.

“Tell him you wanna bone,” Nate says sagely, pouring Eddie another massive glug of booze one-handed so he doesn’t have to take his other hand from between Eddie’s shoulder blades.

“Absolutely not,” Eddie retorts primly. “Fuck you.”

“Man, _I like you_. Why’d you wait till today to be interesting?”

Eddie tries to think of a civilian-appropriate answer regarding what went down in Derry, and, inexplicably, the first thing that pops up in his head is one of those vine compilation videos he watched with Richie while he was laid up in the hospital. So he says, deadpan, “Forgot I was a bad bitch.”

Nate laughs so hard he nearly knocks his empty glass off the bar top. Another text comes in from Richie.

**Trashmouth**  
Bev and Mikey said u were talking to Myra today.  
She sign the papers r what Eduardo?

“He’s awfully interested in your marital status for a guy you’re not boning,” Nate points out, once he’s recovered.

“Please stop saying that, for the love of God.”

“What? You wanna bone him. Nothing wrong with that.”

Eddie shoots him a glare and tries a few times before he gets the camera on his phone open. The lighting’s against him, but he tightens the focus just enough so that his scratchy handwriting will be visible. Then he closes out of the chat with Richie to open the group chat instead. He sends the picture and taps nonsense on his keyboard.

“What happened to your face anyway?”

“Got stabbed.”

 _“You what?”_ Nate sputters, coughing his top shelf acetone bourbon all over himself.

“Yeah, look.” Eddie works the tape off the edges on his bandage. It’s been long enough that he doesn’t need to keep it covered anymore, and the stitches should get some air, probably. Right? Isn’t that important? “See?”

“You really are a freak,” Nate says approvingly, and then he whistles. “Shit, man, that had to hurt.”

“Yep, shell— shall— _childhood—_ bully… broke into the inn where I was staying. Stabbed me, so I stabbed him back. There,” Eddie says, giving the center of Nate’s chest a good solid poke with one finger.

 _“You fucking what, Ed?_ Oh, my God,” Nate gushes, laughing hysterically and pouring Eddie another measure of the stuff that he honestly can’t even taste anymore. “Holy fuck, what do you need my help breaking some shithead’s jaw for? Do it yourself, goddamn. You kill the guy?”

“N-no, Richie did.” Eddie throws back the last of his drink and pats Nate on the back when he starts coughing again. Once his hand’s free, he sends what, to him, looks like a pretty polished message, as well as an addendum.

**Eddie**  
Noe uou Losetrs gotta get divofces too

 **Eddie**  
Fufkk

 **Trashmouth  
** DIVORCE? I would but ur mom isnt returning my calls :’(

 **Bevvie**  
Eddie, we’re really proud of you. Drink some water sweetheart <3

 **Trashmouth**  
Isnt it 5 in the afternoon in nyc? Eduardo u lush 😍😍😍

 **Eddie**  
Fcuk im drunk someonje get divietved wih me

 **Haystack**  
Eddie you’re not alone, are you? Are you safe?

 **Eddie**  
my firend Nate’s here says hlelo

 **Big Bill**  
Hi Nate please dont let Eddie drive tonight

 **Eddie**  
wht am I spuposed t do noe?

 **Bevvie**  
Whatever you want, sweetie

 **Unknown**  
i vote drunk karaoke

Eddie squints at his phone and at the warbling ellipses that keep popping up and disappearing, popping up and disappearing. He tabs over to the contact list showing everyone in the group chat Mike started them on. Six out of seven are already loaded into his phone, Richie’s, Bill’s, Mike’s, Bev’s, Ben’s, his own, of course, but then—

“Oh, shit,” he breathes, nearly swooning off his stool.

“What?” Nate claps a big hand over the center of Eddie’s back to keep him steady. “The hell? You’re shaking.”

“Holy shit, no way. _No way.”_

**Eddie**  
wha tthe fic k  
  
 **Big Bill**  
you guys better sit down  
  
 **Haystack**  
No but really, who is that  
  
 **Bevvie**  
Patty? Is that you?  
  
 **Trashmouth**  
??????  
  
 **Unknown**  
reports of my death are greatly exaggerated

The next message that comes in is a picture of Stan Uris, alive, smiling softly at the camera. There’s a beach behind him. He’s alone.

Eddie drops his phone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!


	4. Cahoots, AZ

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mike gets to the "Stan is alive!" party a little late, but luckily, everybody was kind enough to wait for him.

The Skype Call in the Bus Terminal

Mike’s halfway back to his airbnb before his phone finally gets service again. The bus he's on lurches to a stop to let a few passengers off, and Mike’s phone lights up with a sudden influx ofunread notifications. He scrolls up once, feels himself sway with vertigo, and unlocks the screen to check his messages. The little badge icon reads (74), and he quickly realizes why, though he has to blink harshly through the heat in his eyes to see.

The hydraulic hiss of the bus doors snaps him back to attention, and he throws himself out onto the sidewalk. He catches bruises from the folding doors and elicits a startled yell from the people on the street, but he’s okay. He stops right there under the bus shelter to read.

He scrubs the tears from his eyes, laughs, and begins to type.

**Mike  
**Someone please call me

He waits long enough that the screen goes dark, but he's still staring right at it when it lights up with an incoming video call. Mike rushes to accept it and starts crying for real.

“Hey, Mike,” Stan says, smiling that same warm, peaceful smile that Mike told himself, above all else, to remember him by. For this very reason. For how true it is, how beautiful, how real.

“Stan!” he gushes back, laughing and crying, gasping for air, all of it. “Oh, my God!”

“Oh, Bev’s asking to join the call. Hang on. Bev? Can you— oh, hi, Ben. Wow, you look…”

“Like a Brazilian soccer player, he knows,” Bev teases entering the frame.

The little pixelated representation of Ben in the video chat flushes bright red, and at Stan’s hearty laugh, flashes a wide, bashful smile. Mike grins, too, like the world’s happiest fool. Another call comes in, this one from Richie.

“Hey, Losers,” he intones, but he's got a huge smile on his face just like the rest of them. “Staniel, let me be the first to say, what the fuck, man?”

“Eddie already beat you to the punch on that one, Rich,” Mike reminds him, and he would know. He just got done reading their texts backwards and forwards.

“Well, I'm saying it vis-a-fuckin-vis, Mikey. Also, Stanley? I'm finding your general hotness, while understated, very offensive. Tone it down? You're cute as a fucking button, dude. Look at those curls, adorable!” Richie cuts himself off at the incoming call and snorts. “Think his ears were burning cuz I said cute?”

Eddie joins the call looking more disheveled than Mike's ever seen him, which is saying something considering they waded through miles of sewage the last time they were together.

Oblivious to everyone else for a long time, Eddie opens his mouth, stops, and stares at the screen with an expression that’s difficult to quantify. Then he says, in a breaking voice limned with drunkenness, “Holy shit, Stan. I thought I was never gonna see you again.”

“I thought I…” Stan’s voice dies out. He clears his throat and makes a harsh sound behind his hand when that doesn't help. There’s an oceanfront behind him, and there must be a beach and a very orange sunset in the other direction, judging by the glow it casts on his face. Even crying, he's radiant and full of life. “I thought I'd be a liability if I went. That I’d only drag you down with me.”

“Wanna talk liabil-ility?” Eddie mumbles, doing the funky chicken with his sling.

“Eds…”

“Fuck off, don't call me Eds. Stan, lis-list-li-look, we’re Losers, right? We stick together. I just— I just got divorced, and my wife, my ex-wife, fuck… _Myra._ She tried to tell me I couldn't leave because of this,” he grouses, moving his arm so it’s more visible. “And that's bullshit, Stan. It's bullshit!” He gestures emphatically with his left hand, forceful and only a little clumsy in the motion. “I'll kill a clown any day of the fucking week, and you’ll— all you Losers’ll be right there with me. Fuck what I lost. **_I’m_** _not lost,_ and you’re not either, okay?” He loses steam, starting to choke up. “I love you. I fucking love you, and I don't want you to be sorry. I want you to— to know that you're my best fucking friend and that that matters more to me than everything else. Fuck your liability, I love you.”

Stan presses the heel of his hand into one eye and then the other, but his mouth is curved into a smile and his shoulders are shaking. “You really didn't change a bit, did you, Eddie?”

“I'm taller and I don't get carded at bars anymore. _Fuck you, Richie, 5’9” is fucking average!”_

Another call comes in. Mike accepts it, and Bill’s square fills up a spot at the bottom right corner of the screen, putting him opposite Stan with Bev and Ben above him and Eddie and Richie stacked up on the other side over Stan. Mike takes a screenshot, liking the look of his friends bookending him on either side.

“Sorry it took me a while to get here. I've been making phone calls all day. Finally hit a stopping point. What'd I miss?”

“Eddie’s drunk, and Stan’s never done anything wrong, ever,” Bev summarizes sweetly.

“In this house we love and cherish Stan Uris,” Richie chirps agreeably. “One might even say, _we stan._ ”

“He is the man, as we all know,” Mike adds.

Stan shakes his head, eyes wet, smile big.

“Oh, well, I knew all that already,” Bill says breezily. “Eddie? You okay, bud?”

“I'm fine, Bill— oh, shit—” Eddie’s screen shakes and flings itself into darkness. “Goddamn it. Are you there? Did I end the call?”

“We can hear you loud and clear, Eddie,” Mike tells him. “But now that we're all here, and since I only know what you guys put in the group chat, what happened, Stan? Bev talked to Patty. She said… well, you know what she said.”

“She wanted to give me time,” Stan says, pretty calmly for someone who was thought to be dead until a few hours ago. He sighs, looking away and putting the sun in his brown eyes so the light shoots right through them. “I haven't really talked to her about it yet, but I think she thought… that she had to protect me from you. I really scared the hell out of her, and seeing me like that had to feel like… I wish she hadn’t lied to you, but I know why she thought she had to. I hope you guys… I know you’re not mad at me, and I’m grateful for that, but I hope you won't be mad at Patty either. She loves me. She just wanted to protect me, and that was the only way she knew how.”

Richie sighs grandly. “Okay, fine, but for the record, I do this out of the kindness of my heart and because I love you and your stupid sweet face. Just know that mourning you has taken years off my life, and I would appreciate not having to grieve you again anytime soon.”

“Same,” Eddie echoes somberly, settling his device on a more secure perch. “Can we talk about the fucking beach, dude? You saw it, too, right?”

“I saw it,” Stan confirms for him. “I was there.”

“So it wasn’t the Deadlights?” Mike asks, remembering where he is and digging a tangled up pair of earbuds out of his backpack. He jogs away from the street and under the awning of a financial building of some sort, trying futilely to shake the tangles out of his earbuds. “It was an actual beach?”

Eddie wrinkles his nose. “Sort of? At first we weren’t anywhere.”

“I think I dreamed about you,” Stan says, getting a distant, ponderous look on his face to match Eddie’s. “Then everything just— exploded, and suddenly we were on a beach.”

Mike plugs in the headphone jack and pops in both ear pieces. He sits on a raised bench of concrete and settles his backpack between his knees. “What do you mean, exploded?”

“Like I was completely unconscious and drugged out of my mind one second, and the next, I did this to my hand,” he explains, panning his camera down to show a splinted thumb, “and my arm felt like it was on fire.”

“And Eddie was there?” Mike clarifies. “Which arm, Stan?”

“Hang on, I’ve still got a bruise. I’ll show you.” His screen jerks to the side while he gets his sleeve out of the way, and when it resettles, they’re all looking at a yellowing bruise the size of a cantaloupe. Parts of it are abraded red as if from road rash. “It’s taking forever to go down. This is where It bit you, isn’t it, Eddie?”

“Yeah,” he says, getting closer to his screen so it fills up with his worried expression. “God, Stan, did It… get you? When It got me?”

“I think so. I remember telling you— to take mine. I don’t know how or why that worked, but I’m glad it did.”

Eddie nods blankly, palming his shoulder on that side and looking away. He clears his throat, but his voice still comes out rough. “Thanks, Stan.”

“You guys’ve really been through it, huh?” a voice off-screen says, breaking the silence and stepping neatly into view. Her face lights up seeing one of them, and it turns out to be, understandably enough, Stan that she’s excited to see. “I thought I recognized that voice. Heya, Stan. Look at you! Still alive!”

“Hi, Audra,” he muses, flashing a small genuine smile and winning all of them a sparklingly photogenic wink.

Mike gasps, recognition hitting him. “Hey! You're Audra Phillips! Gosh, I loved you in _Capturing Cassandra_ , and your run as Miranda in _The Tempest_ was just phenomenal.”

A surprised grin stutters over her face, and Mike doesn't think he imagines that her cheeks get a little pink. “Damn, I didn't think anyone knew that I used to do theater,” she says with a playfully bland, cheeky glance in Bill’s direction, and he definitely turns red.

Richie snickers. “God, I love being a bachelor.”

“Eat me,” Audra quips back, sweeter than sugar.

Bev smothers a laugh that they can't actually hear over Eddie’s braying cackle. She says, “Please don't ever leave. I've been the only girl for twenty-seven years.”

“Try and get rid of me, gorgeous,” Audra teases, and gosh, Mike might be in love with her, just a little bit. They might all be in love with her. “Hey, while you're all in one spot, your boy Bill’s got an industry-killer in the works, and we need bodies to make it happen. Any of you interested?”

“I'm in,” Stan says straight away.

“Seeing as I'm also in the process of transforming my career from the flaming dumpster of yore, sure,” Richie answers easily. “Why the hell not?”

“Count me in, too,” Mike adds.

“And us?” Bev asks, looking up at Ben with a tender look. At his nod, she flashes a smile and says, “We’re in.”

“Eddie?” Bill asks, in a soft, guiding kind of voice, his one that's always said, _You picked me to lead you, and I won't get it wrong._ That voice that says, _Trust me. You matter to me, so trust me_. “What do you say? It won't work without you.”

“Ugh, you assholes,” Eddie groans, but not like he actually means it. “Okay, fine. _Fine!_ Not that you've even really pitched anything yet, but I'll do it, okay?”

“Thanks, guys,” Bill says, beaming. “You won't regret it.”

“I already do,” Richie sighs dramatically. “This big project wouldn't happen to be a porno, would it, Bill? I'm very uniquely suited to—”

“Beep beep, Richie,” six voices say as one.

“You guys really did grow up together,” Audra says, looking entertained. “ _So much_ is clicking for me about you right now,” she tells Bill.

Mike grins so hard his cheeks hurt. He can't wait for everyone to get back together. _Everyone,_ God, it's more than he ever thought he could dream for. He saw the Grand Canyon today, but he's got a better view now, looking at his friends and knowing they're looking back at him.

“Your face is gonna get stuck that way, Mike,” Bev says, tapping the screen until Mike covers his smiling mouth with his hand.

“At least it's a great face,” Eddie mumbles, rubbing at his eyes sleepily. “You look like the Old Spice guy. What the fuck. Stan, has anyone— anyone told you how hot you are yet?”

“Richie voiced a complaint to that effect,” Stan tells him easily.

“You are pretty irresistible, Stan,” Bill agrees, earning him a fond smile from Audra and her hand in his hair.

“I'm gonna hug you,” Eddie grunts sulkily, taking them off his nightstand and into bed with him. He must be recording from his phone. His head hits the pillow and his eyes stay closed, and the angle only lets them see half of his face. Probably wiped from equal parts excitement and relief, and also very, very, endearingly drunk, Eddie says, “Can I hug you when I see you, Stan?”

“You can all hug me.”

“My arm hurts,” Eddie mumbles plaintively, like he’s only just remembered to think about it.

“Mine, too,” Stan replies in a soft voice.

“Just so you’re aware,” Mike cuts in gently, wanting to bring them back from the pain, “next time I see you, I’m gonna hug both of you _at the same time_.”

“You're gonna have to fight me for first dibs, Mike,” Bev pops back.

“Or we could all hug at once,” Ben suggests cheerfully.

“No, you’re gonna have to fight me for first dibs,” she says, unmoved.

“Not me,” Richie says, wagging his eyebrows. “I'm all about sloppy seconds.”

“Put your money where your mouth is,” Eddie slurs, most of the way to being asleep. “Sloppy bitch.”

There's a beat, and then everyone's laughing too loud for Richie’s crowing to be distinguishable through it. Mike's face really might get stuck, but anything would be worth feeling like this.

When they settle down and Eddie’s phone stays pointing at a dimly lit ceiling, Ben speaks up.

“Are you gonna talk to Patty about what happened, Stan? I know you said her heart was in the right place,” he says, wrapping an arm around Bev as he does, “and I'm sure that's true, but—”

“Yeah, yeah, kind of a dick move,” Richie says, waving his hand. “We already said we wouldn’t hold it against her.”

“Seriously. Cut the girl a break,” Audra says, frowning. “The amount of crazy, unspeakable shit I’ve learned over the last few days?” She gives Bill a look so unimpressed that Mike can’t stop a laugh from escaping. Her expression softens swinging back to the camera, and Mike feels himself blush. “I’m just saying, if Stan says she did it to protect him, she did it to protect him, and it’s nothing less than any of you would’ve done.”

“That’s true,” Ben concedes, nodding thoughtfully, though his expression stays sweet and concerned. “But that’s not really what I mean. She was afraid we were going to be bad for you, right? Well, you talking to us now just because she can’t stop you, won’t that make her more afraid?”

They stare in silence, none of them having an answer.

Ben shrugs meekly at the screen, saying, “Maybe she’d feel better about knowing you’re letting us back into your life if you filled her in on a few things. You said it yourself, Audra. What we went through was crazy, and unspeakable. But to be on the edge of it with no context?”

“Ben’s right, Stan,” Bill says, looking at him through the camera. “Maybe we can do this again some other night, but ask Patty along. If she’ll sit down with us, if she’ll hear you out, then she deserves that chance.”

Audra squeezes his shoulder, smiles, and starts to say something, until—

_“Ed? You pass out or what, bud?”_

“Uhh…” Richie says, squinting at the screen. “What the fuck?”

Eddie mumbles something, and then his feed is moving, and somebody else’s face fills up the screen, too close for a moment, before pulling back.

“Oh, shit,” the guy says, squinting at their matching confused faces. “Thought it sounded like a party in here.”

“You wouldn’t happen to be Nate, would you?” Mike asks, remembering the group chat right before Stan joined in.

“Yeah, that’s me,” the guy says, and even in the dim light of Eddie’s room, his muscles and tattoos are very visible. Something flickers in his face, and he adds, “Which one of you’s Trashmouth?”

Richie holds up his hand, and Nate eyes him up with a completely unreadable expression.

“Huh,” he says after a moment, looking down at Eddie. “Standby.”

Nate sets Eddie’s phone down, probably on a dresser since they get a nice view of a lampshade, and then all seven of them listen to the sound of sheets rustling. Eddie grouses something indistinguishable, and Nate grumbles something back. Finally the bulb over the nightstand goes out, and they’re being walked out of the room to where the lighting’s better.

“Uh, sorry, but why do you know my name, though?” Richie asks, still holding his hand up like he’s forgotten he can put it down.

“Cuz your friend’s my friend,” Nate rumbles gravely, completing the effect with a boyish smile. “Speaking of friends, either one of you Beverly?”

“I’m Beverly,” Bev says, waving.

“Ooh,” Nate mumbles, like he didn’t quite mean to make a sound, then he clears his throat, flashes that smile again, and says, “Heard you got an ex in need of a beatdown, ma’am?”

“Oh, that’s sweet, but you don’t—”

“I bet I can find his address,” Stan murmurs, already typing on his phone from the look of it.

Nate snorts. “Good man. Text Ed, he’ll make sure I see it. I’m headin’ out.”

“ _Who_ are you?” Richie asks, finally putting his hand down when Nate stops to look at him.

“Head of security over at Ed’s place. Or I mean, guess it’s not his anymore,” he adds, looking around at the ornate wallpaper. “We got to talking. He’s kind of a fuckin’ badass, y’know?”

Richie blinks, thawing a little. “Yeah,” he says.

“Mmhmm. Hey, listen. Richie, right?”

He gulps. “Um… uh huh.”

“Nice work on that Bowers guy,” he croons, and promptly disconnects.

 _“What the fuck,”_ Richie repeats emphatically.

“He seems nice,” Mike says without a trace of irony, and a sincere smile to tie it all together.

“At least we know Eddie’s safe,” Bev adds, smiling, too.

Stan reads a street address off his phone and looks to Bev for confirmation. He gives a quiet laugh at her surprised expression and types out a quick text they can’t see, murmuring, “I send this with only one stipulation, and that’s that I want video footage. I missed all the other epic showdowns. I’m _watching_ this one.”

“You had a pretty close seat for the one that mattered most,” Ben reminds him.

“You even had a chance to punch Maturin in his turtle dick,” Bill adds, raising his eyebrows. “Can’t believe you passed on that one, Stan.”

“No, I get it,” Richie says, tapping his screen. “Stuff like that, you see it and you don’t get the option of throwing hands. Like the smoke-hole, Mikey. Remember?”

“Yeah, that’s true. If you’re only there to bear witness, you can’t do much else but pay attention.”

“Okay,” Audra cuts in, smiling prettily when they all look at her. “I draw the line at inter-dimensional space turtles. The killer clown thing was upsetting enough. Fellas,” she says, expansively, and then, sweeter, “Beverly— it was super great meeting you all. I’ll email you the deets for Bill’s thing once we score a director. See you all later.”

“Bye, Audra,” Stan calls out first, followed by Mike and Bev and Ben.

Bill watches her go until the door clicks shut behind her.

“She’s definitely out of your league, Bill,” Stan says, and then they’re laughing again, ribbing Bill each other and teasing out the fledgling details of Bill’s new horror concept.

It’s historical fiction. Mike just about faints.

“Do you need someone on research? I’m available.”

Everyone else is laughing, but that’s okay. He’s not the only one quick to volunteer his hands or his heart. Bev wants to do costuming and Ben wants to build sets and Richie wants to work on storyboarding and character sketches.

“What do you want to do, Stan?” Bev asks, smiling softly at him and bringing attention to how much quieter he’s gotten.

He thinks for a few seconds until saying, seriously, “Well, do you need an accountant on hand, Bill?”

“Now that we’re going to be on a B-movie budget? Hell yeah, Stan, I’m gonna need an accountant. Honestly, if all you wanted to do was take naps and eat junk food you’d be welcome on set. Any of you would be.”

“What about Eddie?” Stan asks.

“Hell, put one of those Sherlock hats on him and stick him in the background somewhere,” Richie says. “He’s so fucking cute, those big eyes on a promotional poster’ll bring everybody in.”

“A Sherlock hat?” Ben asks Bev in an aside.

“A deerstalker,” she tells him, eyes going distant for a second. “Does your Sleepy Hollow need a Christopher Walken, Bill?”

“What do you— oh, a silent antagonist?” He hums thoughtfully. “That could be interesting.”

“Kind of a waste of his smart mouth, if you ask me,” Richie muses.

“I agree with you, but lines would require stage presence and acting abili—” Bill narrows his eyes at Richie. “ _You’ve_ got experience performing in front of people, Rich. Do you want a speaking part? I could write something up for you tonight.”

Richie looks aghast.

Ben uses his sudden speechlessness to say, “You did say you were looking into refreshing your career, Rich.”

“Not with a period film!”

“Why not?” Bev teases. “You and Eddie could have matching deerstalkers.”

“That’s— okay,” Richie huffs, turning an adorable tomato red. “First of all, how dare you? And second of all, how _actually_ dare you?”

Bev smiles sweetly. “But you’re considering it, aren’t you?”

“If neither of you wind up wanting to be in the movie, you can hang out with me and load up on snacks,” Stan says, typing on his phone again. The sun’s considerably lower in the sky now, as evidenced by the blue tinge to the sky. It brings out the deepening tan in his skin. “Check your email when you get a chance. Audra found us a director.”

Mike loves the sound of that. Stan, referring to all of them jointly as _us_. His heart aches, overfull. “I gotta go soon,” he tells them. “My battery’s nearly dead, and I need the GPS to get back to my airbnb. But I’m gonna look for that email, and I’ll be in the group chat if any of you need me, okay? And Stan? Thanks for reaching out, man. It was really good seeing you.”

“You, too, Mike.”

“Later, Mikey!” the rest of them say in a mismatched chorus.

Mike disconnects, pulls his earbuds out, and looks up searchingly at the sky. He can’t believe they made it out. He can’t believe they won.

If he cries a little bit on the way to the airbnb, well, that’s his business. Just like his big stupid grin is his business, and his full heart, and all the people left in the world that he loves sitting tight in his pocket. Safe, whole.

It’s a good day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	5. Watershed, CA

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie meets some Very Cute Boys in a comedy club, and they're quick to adopt him. So is the comic who comes down from the stage to meet him.
> 
> AKA, Don & Adrian ship reddie like whoa, and I like writing southern accents.

The Diamond in the Comedy Club

Three days after Richie’s been liberated from his manager and his agency, he finds himself at a squat little comedy club in Santa Monica waiting for the open mics to start. It had been a long shitty week of closed door negotiations and stacks of severance paperwork, but he'd sort of expected that after the same exact thing happened to Bill. The shows he'd missed had just cost them too much to keep him around, and he hadn't been willing to roll with the new material they'd been scraping together to try and save his shitdicked career.

To hell with their pre-written crap. He could pull himself up by his own damn bootstraps, or whatever the hell the saying was. And anyway, he's got Bill’s big picture to think about. That oughta keep him plenty busy, and if all goes well, he might even get some new material to run with for when he's ready to hit the big stage again for real.

The lights come up, and his phone buzzes, the sound fading in the scattered applause. It's petite for a comedy club, but they cram everybody in like sardines, and the turnout’s pretty good for a Thursday night. He’s sharing a table with a trio of drunk college girls, a nervous housewife type clutching her purse for dear life, and two young guys who keep making out like they want someone to give them hell for it. Richie's not, he’s never been the type, but he also can't quite— stop looking. In their general direction. Whatever.

People are standing and sitting on every flat surface they can just to fit. They only move to make room for bartenders rushing around putting out drink orders. It's a tightly controlled web of madness. Richie loves it.

Five grueling minutes into the first comic’s set, he checks his phone. A message for the group chat and a missed call from one of Audra’s industry contacts. He listens to the voicemail, barely able to hear it properly over the intermittent laughs all around him, and sort of makes out the tinny female voice. Something about a group of kids who want to film a documentary and asking him to check his email for more details.

He's one of about two dozen people CC’d on it. They hit up everyone Bill’s roped into his project, Audra and her people, Bev and her fashion biz collaborators, the Losers. The kids wanting to do the documentary are right out of college, and they've got a few titles under their collective belt already. Pretty impressive for being so young. He has no idea how they got everyone's email addresses this quickly, though. Technology.

The second comic of the night hits the stage, and Richie gives him the requisite five minutes before going back to his phone. Another message comes in, this one from Eddie in their private thread. Not that there's anything inherently secretive about it, but it's theirs. Sometimes he lets himself think that means something. Tonight's one of those nights. He orders his second whiskey of the evening and waits for it to get to his table before opening the text from Eddie.

**my love  
** Why aren't you responding in the group chat?

**my love  
** I can see that you're reading my texts, asshole

God, it's unfair the way Richie feels about him. The way he's always felt about him. He takes a long deep drink and rubs his fingers together until the condensation soaks into his skin.

**Richie  
** Didja miss me that badly, Eduardo? Well here I am😘

**my love  
** Fuck you, we’re having a serious conversation about whether   
Lord of the Rings is better than Game of Thrones

**Richie  
** Of course it's better

**my love  
** See? I need you

His whole heart aches, reading that. He hovers his fingers over the keyboard but doesn't type anything. This is when he cracks a joke or abuses the eggplant emoji or sends a meme of Sean Bean captioned, _One does not simply out-fantasy LotR_. It should be easy. Eddie’s not here to know what kind of face Richie’s making, he's not here to feel the shift in his mood. He finishes the last of his whiskey and signals for another. His phone buzzes again. Richie checks the screen and winces. The crowd around him applauds weakly.

**my love  
** Motherfucker

**my love  
** This isn't over stop ignoring me

“Hey, handsome, penny for your thoughts?”

Richie looks up belatedly, and the really good-looking guy with his arm around the equally good-looking guy he's been making out with all night, grins at him. For a second Richie just gawks, and then he shuts his mouth and turns red, red.

“Sorry?”

“I said,” he croons, slinking closer around the spare gap between them on the round booth they're sat in, “hey, handsome, penny for your thoughts?”

“Adrian, come on,” the other handsome guy says, but like this happens all the time and he's mostly resigned to it by now.

“Well, um…” Richie hesitates. He's not toasted enough to come out to a stranger, even a beautiful stranger. Even a beautiful stranger in a way-too-tight tank top who thinks he's hitting on a straight guy to make him uncomfortable, rather than hitting on a fiercely closeted guy to make him uncomfortable. “I got fired?”

“Sucks. Sorry.” His smile doesn't waver and neither does the gleam in his eyes. “Doesn't explain why you were staring, though,” he adds with a smile like a knife.

Richie doesn't even bother denying it. He's blushing too hard for that. He just downs his third whiskey when the bartender brings it over.

“Adrian, come on, leave him alone.”

“Donnie gets nervous about homophobes in public. You a homophobe, handsome?”

“I promise I’m not,” Richie coughs, slamming his empty glass on the table.

“Well, then, that makes us friends.” The guy, Adrian, smacks an arm around Richie’s shoulders and produces a joint from some pocket Richie didn't see. “You partake?”

Richie shrugs, not opposed if it's on offer. He takes a hit and passes it back and forth between Adrian and the other guy Donnie. It loosens him up enough that he even actually laughs a little at the last leg of the second comic’s set.

“Your love’s blowing up your phone, man,” Adrian tells him coyly from around the joint held between his teeth.

The other guy, who actually prefers to be called Don, cranes his head to look at the screen when Richie makes no effort to hide it. He cracks a small smile and says, “You're gonna wind up in the doghouse if you're not careful.”

The comic onstage waves politely at the audience and exits stage left, to healthy applause.

Richie idly swipes around to his text messages and rubs blearily at his eye under his glasses as he reads. “God, he's cute,” he sighs, to a sharp laugh from Adrian and a low chuckle from Don.

**my love  
** Fuck you, Richie, the group chat exists for a reason

**my love  
** Why did you quit answering my texts

**my love  
** I know you just got dropped from your agency, so you're probably getting   
drunk alone somewhere, and if I wasn't currently trapped under the world’s   
best dog and in another state I'd be there to get drunk with you

**my love  
** I'm trying to say I'm sorry you lost your job

**my love**  
Even though it was a shitty job and you weren't even doing something you like,   
EVEN THOUGH YOURE FUCKING FUNNY WHEN YOU MAKE AN   
EFFORT, DUMBASS

**my love**  
I don't know why you had somebody ghost writing fucking masturbation   
jokes for you in the first place don’t you believe in yourself at all wtf

**my love  
** Asshole

**my love**  
Fine get drunk alone you idiot

**Richie**  
But im your idiot, right Eds?

**my love**  
Don’t call me that like you weren’t just fucking ignoring me

**Richie**  
sorry ur right im drunk and a hot stragner gave me weedd

**Richie**  
i love califnroia

**my love**  
Well I hope she’s pretty, dickhead

“Augh,” he says, pretty goddamn articulately, given how he feels. “He’s so mean. I love it.”

“Here, give me your phone,” Don says, and being that he’s the responsible one in their little clique, Richie gives it to him. “Scoot over, and Adrian, put your arm back around him.”

“I’ll do ya one better, babe,” he teases. “Kiss on the cheek: yes, or no?” When Richie just stares at him in amazement, he says, slowly, “A kiss on the cheek, would you like one?” His usually-predatory smile is kinder now, sweeter. Then he winks. “Y’know. Give him a reason to be jealous, and maybe a little confused about _why_ he’s jealous. Dig me, handsome?”

“ _I’m_ confused.”

“Richie,” Don says, almost philosophically, “I don’t think you actually believe that.”

Richie bites his lip and the next comic walks out onto the stage. Some young, crisply manicured guy who might even be better-looking than the kid hanging off him. What the fuck.

“Yeah, all right, fuck it,” he says, turning his cheek. He closes his eye on the side he’s getting a kiss, and the flash goes off.

“Golly, pitchers this early in the set? God _damn_ , don’t it pay to be a baby-faced white boy in Hollywood?” the guy on stage says, in a lovable southern drawl that might even be genuine.

The crowd loves him already, to hear them cheer, and why wouldn't they?

“Guess you took a wrong turn at Beverly Hills, kiddo,” Richie says, without really knowing why.

Babyface in the skinny jeans onstage holds his hand over his brow like he’s A Very Generous rendition of George Washington crossing the Delaware. He flashes a grin, and even that wins him tinkling laughs from the drunk college girls at Richie’s table. Adrian holds out his phone, and Richie can’t tell if he’s filming or taking a picture or streaming the whole thing to some website somewhere.

“As I live and breathe. Ladies and gentlemen, I _think_ we got us Netflix royalty in the house. Richie Tozier, that you?”

Babyfaced Blond grins at Richie’s cascading wave favored by butlers and magicians the world over, to some hearty applause, actually, and that recognition twists something ugly in Richie’s chest. He doesn’t want anyone to love him for what he’s done professionally as Trashmouth. It’s not him. None of it’s him.

The guy onstage flashes a hundred-watt smile, lolling but hungry, like an alligator tipping only its eyes above the water. Like he’s glad his heckler has a name and a face.

“Well, don’t this beat all,” he purrs. “Gosh, if my twelve-year-old nephew were here, he’d be pissin’ himself. That is your demographic, ain’t it?” He pauses to a silence so perfect anyone would hear a pin drop. Then he adds, “Guess he’ll just have to be disappointed like the rest of us.”

Don covers his mouth, but Adrian yells a resounding _“Ohhhh!”_ along with the whole rest of the tiny, packed club. They’re yelling loud enough to blow the roof off the place, and _Jesus Christ,_ he can’t blame them. Richie’s laughing, too. Sue him, he’s got a soft spot in his heart for Fresh-Faced & Feral.

His phone buzzes on the table, distracting him from all the hell-raising he’d been prepared to do, just to see it bounce off the guy’s chiseled jaw.

**my love**  
Are you at a gay bar?

**Richie**  
no actulyy I hd to come to a cmedy club for a guy to kiss me

**Richie**  
how doy ou type so fast w one han d

**my love**  
Frustration.

**Richie**  
Make s snse

The three dots bounce beneath the text bubbles, wink out, bounce, wink out, and repeat in a little dance. Richie sets his phone down and watches the set, riveted, laughing well past the five-minute mark. The guy’s good, and his accent never slips, not even on the tricky vowel sounds Richie’s spent years fine tuning.

He scoops up tonight’s program from the center of the round table and scans for the guy’s name, only to despair when he can’t find it.

“Culture’s a funny thing,” the guy muses ponderously, artfully unwinding the cord from the mic stand and prowling the stage. “I mean, even the most commonplace, widespread, unavoidable bullshit, we find ways to do it differently. _Tawkin’,”_ he says drolly, to make his point, _“Raht?”_ He waits for the raucous laughter to die down.

“Accents are the most obvious one, but I’ve been thinkin’ about somethin’ actually pretty serious lately. I’ve been thinkin’ ’bout… ’bout the Great Beyond. The Spirit in the Sky, you know? Like, however you think about it, however you internalize what death really is. ‘Cuz for me, growin’ up moneyed and handsome in Texas,” he says, starting to giggle at himself. He pitches his voice up to say, in a put-on, brittle voice, “Oh, life was _so_ _hard_ , havin’ this _white body_ and parents who put me _through_ _school._ How I struggled!”

He pauses again for the titters at the expense of his self-awareness, but Richie stays honed in on him, waiting, knowing the sarcasm’s only the lead-in to the punchline.

“And I mean, yeah, privilege, we could talk about _that_ and the whole _bullshit_ _culture of that_ till they shut the lights off and spray us with a hose. But where I was goin’ with this is, my perception of death, y’know? It’s all wrapped up in funerals. I was taught, you live your life, you go to God, and everybody left behind gets a pie, for some reason. There’s always a pie. You got that out here? It’s crazy, this Southern fixation we got with pie curin’ all ails. **Your gran’ma died? Here, it’s pecan, cheer the fuck up.** ” He transitions neatly from the gruff, growled impersonation into a shellshocked little moue of innocence that everybody laughs at.

He runs his hand through his hair, taking it out of its pressed back wave so that it falls more like a lion’s mane. It changes the whole look of him somehow, from spoiled rich boy slumming it with the heathens, to Heath Ledger Sir Ulriching it up in his modest little hometown.

“Now my gran’ma did actually die. Don’t you _dare_ _‘aww’_ for that woman. I curse the day that miserable witch _ever_ set eyes on my grandaddy and put his balls in her diaphragm.”

Richie nearly perforates a fucking lung at that. Don pushes a glass of water over to him, and Adrian thumps his back, typing furiously on what looks like instagram. That must be how Eddie does it, all focus and determination.

“I forget what I… oh!” He tips his hand out in front of him, deliberately effete. “Pie and inheritances, that’s what we make outta death in the South. Now my gran’ma, the last thing she ever said to me was…” He clears his throat and affects a pretty good approximation of a shrill Southern Belle pushing ninety. _“Herschel Declan Ambrose, you are a disgrace to this family. God made a mistake when He made you the way you are. You’re a sinner, and you and that perfect golden face He gave you are gonna burn forever in the fires of hell!”_

A beat, and then, innocently, “I told her, but Gran’ma… Blonds have more fun.”

The room explodes again in laughter, and Richie feels something come unlocked inside him. Something warm and revelatory and pure.

There was a time in his life, a million years ago it seems like, when he knew how to wield humor like a vorpal blade. When he even held off the clown with a fistful of itching powder and a wonky voice. He doesn’t know when he lost that. He doesn’t know when it happened that he stopped believing in himself.

“She wasn’t a fan of my taste in bed partners, we’ll leave it at that,” Herschel says, and Richie’s phone buzzes.

**my love**  
Do you always go to bars trying to kiss guys?

“Anyway, we put her in the ground three days ago. Old bat wanted to be buried with her pearls and her prettiest diamond ring,” Herschel muses, screwing the mic back into the stand, grasping it so that his fingers fan over it, the diamond on his finger catching in the stage lights. He gazes out into the crowd, wide-eyed and sincere, and the shocked gasps and chuckles ratchet up bit by bit, gaining shouts and whistles and cheers until people are screaming and losing their minds.

Richie howls right along with them and claps until his palms sting. Herschel finishes out his set with a bow for flavor, and Richie’s phone buzzes again. He looks down at the words and concentrates very hard on sounding sober.

**my love  
** Never mind I don’t know why I asked

**Richie**  
I do

**my love**  
You do?

**Richie**  
wanna kiss guys

**Richie**  
nd I know why u askd

**my love  
** Why did I ask?

“What do I do? What do I say?” Richie groans, turning his phone so Don and Adrian can see.

“Oh, my God, I feel like a fairy godmother,” Adrian says, fanning his face and twisting up his face like he’s thinking about crying.

“Adrian, shush. Richie? Listen to me very closely.”

Richie nods solemnly. “You’re my sherpa, Don, a hundred percent. Guide me, man.”

**Richie**  
bc u wanna knw if I’d kiss u

Dots bounce and bounce and bounce. They disappear. They bounce and bounce. They disappear. They bounce.

**my love**  
You’re drunk, Rich

**Richie**  
was I drnuk 27 yrs ago whn I carvd our intals on the kssing bridge

“The Kissing Bridge?” Don asks suddenly, snapping Richie out of his staring match with Eddie’s _typing_ dots. “Wait, _the_ Kissing Bridge, in _Derry?”_

“Yeah, it’s my hometown,” Richie says, dropping his phone when it buzzes. “Ours, our hometown. Mine and Eddie’s.”

**my love**  
You’re full of shit. Call me in the morning.

**my love**  
Dickhead

**my love**  
<3

“Oh, shit,” Adrian says.

“He sent me a heart!” Richie shouts, grinning, and then, noticing Adrian’s not looking at him, follows the line of his eyes. “Oh, shit.”

“Hey there,” says Herschel Declan Ambrose, looking even prettier in person than he did all lit up in the stage lights. “Y’all got room at this table for one more?”

Richie rushes to type one more text.

**Richie**  
Gnight Eddie my love

**my love**  
Drink some water, dumbass

**my love**  
Goodnight

“Thank you, darlin’,” their guest says, seating himself demurely at the booth when the drunk girls get up to make room for him. Herschel Declan Ambrose slides over into the space at Richie’s left side, suave as anything, and holds out his hand. “Name’s Herschel.”

“Richie,” he mumbles back, making up for his weak response with a hearty handshake that goes both ways.

“Nice to meet you, Richie. Sorry to shit-talk you to the strangers,” he muses, a million dollar smile twitching over his handsome face. “But y’know, I kinda got the feelin’ after a minute that you didn’t hate it all that much. Hello!”

“Please do not mind me a bit,” Adrian coos, and doesn’t stop filming them or taking a picture or whatever it is he’s doing. _“My God,_ you’re photogenic. Don, isn’t he photogenic?”

“I’m so sorry about him,” Don says, laughing, and trying, without success, to make Adrian stop.

“Hell, I don’t mind. I wonder if it won’t get you in trouble, though,” he adds in an undertone, looking at Richie again, blue eyes gone serious. “Seein’ how people talk and all.”

“I got fired,” Richie tells him, waving his hand as if to clear a bad smell, which is just what his career to now has been.

“Oh, shit, Richie, I thought you were making that up,” Adrian says, frowning at him from around the side of his phone. He even lowers it for a second, only holding it aloft again when Don tries to grab it from him. “I’m sorry, man.”

“No, please, it was— fuck all that. It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.”

Bright-eyed and fresh-faced Herschel Declan Ambrose gives him a look then, laser-focused, and sharper than the clown’s teeth, with more power behind it than the bite that took off half of Eddie’s arm, even with Stan taking most of the hit for him.

Herschel Declan Ambrose perches one sculpted arm on the back of the booth so he can bring his knee up onto the seat and says, slowly, deliberately, “Doesn’t matter, why?”

_Because I want to do what you just did,_ Richie thinks. _I want it to be a weapon in my hand again._

“I want my power back,” he hears himself say, watching the spark in the kid’s eyes hit like lightning. Like stage lights catching on a dead bigot’s diamond ring. “I gave it away once, and I want it back.”

“Well,” he says on a breath, smiling with that same intensity and ruthlessness that reminds Richie— so much of him, his neatness, his likable bitchiness, his impeccable timing, his cutting rejoinders, his spiteful resilience— of Eddie. “You had me at power. Actually, if we’re bein’ honest here? Full disclosure? You had me in your back pocket since you let out that belly laugh at the expense of my poor ol’ grandaddy’s testicles.”

Richie snorts, and Herschel grins. Helplessly, he says, “I mean, _it was funny.”_

“Oh, I know it was, Netflix. I wrote it.”

That only gets Richie grinning back at him. He sets his elbow on the booth next to Herschel’s and brings his knee up, too, grateful for the filler racket that keeps his popping joints from joining the conversation.

“Is this foreplay or a business deal?” he hears Adrian ask Don over his shoulder.

“Adrian, now _my_ Instagram is blowing up. _Please stop.”_

“Is it foreplay,” Herschel asks silkily, but Richie’s not fooled— he knows sarcasm’s only the lead-in to the real punchline— and then, “Or do we got us somethin’ better brewin’ here?”

“That all depends on one thing, Cowboy,” Richie says, playing now because Herschel’s been playing since he took the stage tonight. He even breaks out his smoothest Young Cling Eastwood for the occasion. “How’d you really come by that ring on your finger?”

“Honestly,” he answers sweetly, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “I went to her wake like any good grandson would, and I twisted it off her mangled ugly finger ‘fore they shut her up in her little pine box,” he answers, words coming at a fast clip like they’re old hat, nowhere neat as interesting to him as his follow-through. “You ever bury anybody you hated, Richie?”

He thinks of Mikey lying on the ground, dazed, and Bowers standing over him until Richie tumbled him down. He thinks of a monster with all the air taken out of it. A popped red balloon.

“Yeah, I have,” he says.

“Then you get it. Somebody spends their whole life pointin’ at you, waggin’ at you, cursin’ you, wishin’ you were dead? They don’t get to take their finery with ‘em. None of us do, but especially not them. And you know?” He holds his hand out in front of him. The ring positively glows in the dim orange house lights. “She was always lookin’ at me and seein’ gold anyway. Like a treasure. Somethin’ she’d’a stole if there was a way to match her will, and she did try. She’d tried everythin’ she could, so fuck her. Looks better on me anyway.”

“God, you’re cool,” Richie mumbles, shooting a nearby glass that turns out to be water, and remembering that Eddie told him to drink water. He flags down their bartender and asks for more of the stuff.

“It is a business deal,” Adrian says, finally lowering his phone. “I’m disappointed, I was waiting for you to make out.”

“Naw, otters don’t really do it for me,” Herschel muses thoughtfully.

Don laughs, and Adrian raises his eyebrows, shrugging as if to say, _Fair enough._

“What’s an otter?”

“You’re an otter, Richie,” Don tells him kindly. “Not a twink, not a bear. On the scruffy side. In between.”

Richie nods, accepting this wisdom. He digs his phone out and looks for his favorite picture of Eddie. “What would you say about this cute motherfucker?”

They look in turns, Don and Adrian on his right side, and Herschel on his left. The three of them look up at the same time and say, in perfect unison, “Twink.”

“Definitely,” Adrian says, laughing. “Oh, my God, is that the guy you’ve been texting? He _is_ cute.”

_“Thank you_. Yes, God, I’ve been saying that since we were eleven. Fuck.”

Herschel laughs and rubs his finger beneath his lip. He looks across the table at Don and Adrian. “Y’all send over a thirst trap yet?”

“We did,” Adrian purrs, grinning even wider. “But one can never have too many.”

“Y’know, I was thinkin’ the same thing, actually.”

Don rolls his eyes and takes Adrian’s phone when he hands it to him. He says, “You guys are gonna break them up before Richie even makes a move.”

“Don’t be such a prude, Donnie. C’mere, handsome.”

This time Richie’s getting kissed on both sides, by _two_ ridiculously beautiful younger guys. He sends the picture, Eddie replies almost instantly, suitably, hilariously furious. Adrian and Herschel throw their heads back and laugh. Don shakes his head, but he’s laughing, too.

**my love  
** GO TO BED

**Richie**  
;)


	6. Needle-Haystack, NE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some boys go for a ride on a boat, and the group chat is alive and well, my dudes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to say this before, but Herschel Declan Ambrose began in the mind of my dear, beloved friend and lobster, Beguile! He was born on the notion of looting his ugly grandmother's corpse at her funeral with the work ethic of a pack mule and the sweet face of Aaron Tveit. We love him. <3

The Good Handsome Boy(s) in the Boat

“Are you sure this doesn’t look stupid?” Eddie asks, holding the finished waistcoat against his chest. He’s pouting, though he doesn’t seem to realize that that’s what he looks like.

Ben smiles at him. He can’t help it. Cheek in hand, he tells him, “How could it look stupid, Eddie? It was made for you!”

“Yeah, but it’s not, like, too much?”

“No, it suits you.”

Eddie sighs, a blustery sound, and flails one-handed so the waistcoat swishes away from him. He points the hanger at Ben, saying, “I still can’t believe you guys volunteered me to be in this thing. I’m not even an actor.”

“Neither is Richie.”

“Yeah, but he’s a _performer,”_ Eddie shoots back, hanging the garment up on the hook behind the door to the guest room Ben’s put him up in. The basketball shorts he’s wearing are Ben’s, so they fall too long past his knees. The shirt is a garish Hawaiian print that he must’ve nabbed from Richie’s suitcase before he took off back to Los Angeles. “He can do voices and improv, and he knows how he’s supposed to look in front of a camera.”

“Are you telling me you couldn’t give back as good as you got if Richie starting riffing with you in the middle of a scene?” Ben asks, skeptical in a playful kind of way, inviting Eddie to spar with him, though nobody can get him going like Richie can.

“I’d probably be way too nervous! Or I’d keep looking at the camera or forgetting where to stand or what to do with my hands!”

“You’re thinking way too hard about this whole thing, Eddie,” Ben soothes, smiling at him. “Bill’s writing most of the film to follow Audra’s character, right? And Richie’s part isn’t slated to be all that involved. You won’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

Eddie hums, a worried look on his face until he takes a breath and wills his expression to relax. He nods as if to reassure himself. “Yeah, you’re right. I know you’re right.”

“See?” Ben stands and claps Eddie on the back. “It’s all gonna work out fine. The main thing is that you have fun.”

“I thought the main thing was giving Bill and Richie second acts in their tailspinning careers.”

“That, too,” he concedes cheerfully. “But you don’t need to worry about that. You just gotta trust that things will work out how they work out. Bill and Audra know what they’re doing. They won’t give you anything you can’t handle. They’re pros, right? Richie, too. You said so yourself.”

“Yeah,” Eddie sighs, rubbing at his cheek. It’s healed over nicely, and only just beginning to scar. Even a bright pink against his tan skin, it lends a severity to his eyes; a gravitas Eddie’s always had but that used to seem far too big for his body, before.

That’s not the case anymore, now that he’s learned how to carry it. Ben wishes he knew his secret. Then Eddie totally flips the script on all the heroic thoughts Ben’s caught up in having about him and scratches his belly under the busy Hawaiian shirt he’s swimming in. It makes Ben’s heart swell in his chest thinking how much he loves Eddie. Richie has the right idea, calling him cute all the time.

There’s a knock on the door and Bev pokes her head in when Ben calls for her to come in.

“An alarm went off on your phone, Eddie,” she says, coming into the room and holding it out for him to take.

“Thanks, Bevvie.” He takes the phone back from her and checks the notification. “Kay, I’ve got a thing in town. Gonna shower real quick and head out.”

“Do you need a ride anywhere, Eddie?” Ben asks, walking out with him into the hallway.

“No, I’m good, but thanks. Can I take Duke out when I get back?”

“Yeah, of course, you know he loves you.”

“That’s because he’s a _good boy,”_ Eddie praises when he spots Duke down the stairs. He drops to his knees to catch him when he bounds up the entire flight of them to shower Eddie in dog kisses. _“He’s the best boy! Do you know you’re the best boy? Yes! Handsome boy…”_

Bev stands next to Ben in the doorway, a helpless grin on her face to match the one on his when Duke huffs excitedly and thumps his tail happily against the banister. He even follows Eddie to the bathroom to guard him while he showers.

“He’s such a sweetheart,” Bev murmurs, trying and failing to cover a smile behind her hand.

“Eddie or Duke?”

“Yes,” she answers, which gets him to laugh. She turns to head downstairs, and he follows her at a distance.

“How was your Skype call with Audra?”

“Good! She brought on her director friend I told you about, and some of the kids from the documentary team. They’re so young, Ben. I felt old just looking at them.”

“Did they seem like they knew what they were doing?”

“Yeah, the two on the call did.” She shoots a sly, happy look over her shoulder at Ben and spins around on the landing to beam up at him. God, she’s beautiful. She always has been. “They were so excited to be working with women. It was adorable. You should’ve seen how their little faces lit up when they joined the call. I can’t ever remember being like that.”

“You were,” Ben argues, joining her on the landing and holding out his hands for her to take. “You are. Of course you are, Bev. Look at you! Look how much you’ve taken charge of your life since Mike got us all back together. Look how much you’ve stood up for yourself, and for all of us.”

Bev squeezes his hands briefly and favors him with a shy, sweet smile that cuts the whole way through him. The breath stalls in his throat, and he can’t speak. She switches her hold on his hands from both to just one and tugs.

“Do you want to see the new sketches Mike sent over?”

Smiling and letting her lead, he says, “Yeah.”

* * *

After Eddie’s appointment in town and once he’s taken Duke out for a long walk, Ben takes him out for a spin on the boat.

He expects Eddie to give him some grief over not wearing a life jacket as soon as they board, but Ben gets as far as sitting behind the wheel just to put their cell phones away, and there’s still no word. He looks across the way at Eddie, who’s gazing out at the water with his hand scratching idly at Duke’s ear. The two of them have been inseparable since Eddie got here, and Ben really can’t stand how precious the whole situation is.

Eddie seems to feel Ben watching him and glances over without stopping in his ear scratching duties. He says, “What?”

“Did you want a life jacket, Eddie?”

He narrows his eyes and chews on his lip. “Are you making fun of me?”

A laugh startles out of him. He coughs to cover it up. “What? No. Of course not, Eddie. It’s just, I thought you would’ve asked for one by now.”

“We can both swim,” he says, a very serious expression on his face. His lightweight shirt flutters in the breeze except for the sleeve that’s pinned out of the way. “And we’re not going far, are we?”

“Well, no.”

“Are you gonna wear one?”

“No,” Ben hedges. “Actually, Duke could probably fish either one of us out if it came to that.”

“That’s because he’s a good boy,” Eddie reports matter-of-factly, instantly perking up when Duke’s tail starts thumping the carpeted flooring of the boat. “You know we're talking about you, huh? Smart boy.”

“That's because you exclusively call him Good Boy, and now he thinks that's his name.”

“Bev does it, too! Look at him! He's a good boy! Yes, hi,” he laughs, looking and sounding ten years younger with his hand ruffling Duke’s head. “You're very good and handsome, and everybody loves you. Just like your dad.”

Ben sputters a laugh and goes to toss the last of the rope off the deck before climbing back into the boat. He sits behind the wheel again. “Ready to go?”

Eddie calls out an answer in the affirmative and gets a good grip on the safety railing along the prow of the boat. Duke hops up next to him, equally protective and eager to chomp at the wind once they take off.

Ben does a slow circle of the bay, always keeping an eye on Eddie anytime they catch another boat’s wake. Once all three of them are thoroughly wind-chafed, he loops back around to a spot he likes best for sunset viewing. He digs out his orange flag, stakes it at the wheel where it won't budge even if the breeze kicks up, and digs out a few bottles of water. He tosses one to Eddie and pours half of the second one into a clean bowl for Duke.

“You're perfect, Ben. Do you know that?”

“Eddie, come on,” he says, blushing but not entirely displeased at the compliment. “That's a lot to live up to.”

“What's there to live up to? I've lived in your house for a month now, I know all your weird stuff. And while I still don't get your fixation with Spanish soap operas or that thing you do where you wait till it's two in the morning to stuff your face with those gross rice cakes you pretend to like, those aren't exactly deal-breakers, man.”

“What would be a deal-breaker?” Ben asks quietly, genuinely curious. He's never had a great handle on this thing everybody is figuring out, where they learn how to be kinder to themselves. He opens another water bottle for himself.

Eddie plants his own between his knees and twists the cap off in one decisive motion. He shrugs. “We’re Losers, Ben. We get busted up, but we do it together. Deal-breakers are for normal people.”

Ben laughs, liking that answer. He drinks three quarters of the bottle in one go and kicks off his shoes. “I'm glad we went back. I know it… I know _It_ was… something I never wanted to have to face again, but I'm glad we did. I'm glad nobody else has to die, and I'm glad we're here together. You're my best friend, Eddie.”

“Bev’s not your best friend?” he asks in a wry, teasing voice that feels like a mug just beginning to warm over from fresh coffee or hot chocolate.

“Bev’s special,” Ben relents, palming the back of his neck when just admitting it gets his heart beating faster. “But you're special, too, Eddie. All of you are, you're like, you're deep in my heart, deeper than my blood sometimes. But you and Stan,” he says, stopping when his throat closes up on him. “You and Stan, I thought— we all thought we’d lost you again, when we'd only just gotten you back, and we’ve lost so much time already. Eddie, I’m…”

“Shut up,” he croaks, leaping to his feet and covering Ben with a hug. “Shut up. Me, too.”

Ben hugs him tightly. He smells like the water and Duke’s treats and very faintly like Bev’s perfume from when she'd hugged him before they left the house for the pier. Beneath it all right at his temple he smells like cinnamon.

“Hey,” Eddie says, going a little shy. “Let's take a picture.”

Ben steps away to get his phone out of the ziplock baggie holding all their things. He turns so the sunset will be at their backs and says, “Abrázame,” grinning at the blank, and then mildly furious, look that gets him. “You brought it on yourself, mocking my telenovelas.”

“Oh, my God,” Eddie mutters sourly, but his tanned face burns darker with a palpable blush. “You were so innocent a few months ago. We’re ruining you.”

“Hey!” Ben reels him in for another hug that Eddie allows with a tart little glare Ben remembers well from their childhood. “You said no deal-breakers, Eddie.”

“Yeah, whatever,” he huffs, starting to smile but doing his best to hide it.

Ben pulls Eddie in right against his chest so he can tuck his chin into Eddie’s hair and says, “Smile!”

The picture comes out perfect on the first try, and they even get a clear shot of Duke lounging in the background. Ben saves it and sends it to the group chat.

“Mike needs to switch to your carrier,” Eddie muses, watching the picture go through straight away. He's still plastered to Ben’s front and Ben’s still holding him there with an arm around his back, so he just keeps not letting go.

They watch the replies come rolling in one after the other.

**Bev Marsh  
** You two are so sweet. I showed Audra and she said   
you definitely have to model the new line, Eddie

**Richie Tozier  
** Yes plz!!! 🙏🏻👀👌🏻👅🔥🙌🏻🍆💦

**Stan Uris  
** More dog pictures, please. Thank you.

**Mike Hanlon**  
Eddie! That suit? The one with the coat tails? 👍🏾

**Bev Marsh**  
Yes, THAT suit. You are all welcome in advance

**Bill Denbrough**  
Eddie that reminds me I have your part written up.  
Richie was right, your chracter needed a boomstick

**Richie Tozier**  
OH SHIT HELL YEAH

**Bev Marsh  
** Rich, don’t you mean groovy

**Richie Tozier**  
bevvie i am havin a moment here can i live

**Mike Hanlon**  
No, Bev’s right, that’s what he says in the movie

**Richie Tozier**  
i cant believe u guys wont let me have this

**Stan Uris**  
Can I please have more dog pictures.

Eddie snorts and gestures for Ben to give him his phone. His tan in the orange light of the sunset looks very bronze. “Tell Stan I’ll hook him up,” he says, scrolling through his pictures.

**Ben Hanscom**  
Stan, Eddie says ‘dog pictures incoming’

**Stan Uris**  
Finally. Eddie, you get me.

Eddie lovingly takes a few more pictures of Duke with Ben’s phone since his own cell provider has spottier service out on the water. He poses in a few of them, and Ben sets one of Duke licking his face as his contact photo. Eddie really does photograph well. Ben just knows the promotional shots are gonna turn out great.

And as much as he’s balking at the idea of appearing on film, Ben thinks it’ll turn out okay. He’s dramatic enough to make an impression, and if Richie’s there, it’ll be dynamite like always.

Bev’s taken some liberties with the design of the suit since she started tailoring it specifically for Eddie’s tastes and build. The coat tails flare out more than in the original schematics, and the jacket is boxier through the shoulders, but the biggest change is a cape that cascades over his right side. If Ben had to guess, that’s where the boomstick’ll go.

“Hey, so the _boomstick_ thing,” Ben says conversationally, and snaps another picture of Eddie scratching Duke’s belly. “Do you think you might get to do some stunts? Or a fight scene? Ooh, Eddie! Wire work!”

“Yeah, that’s what I want,” he replies, unthinkingly, “to put myself at greater risk for accidents on set. If I have to worry about harnesses and wires yanking me through the air, then the likelihood of whiplash- or concussion-related injury doubles. And don’t _even_ get me started on the locations Mike’s been scouting to shoot this thing. Nova Scotia gets single digit weather in the wintertime, Ben. _Single digit weather!_ And Bill has that whole scene with the body getting dumped, and you _know_ someone’s gonna be in the water at night, which is just _begging_ for pneumonia.

“Cold beaches are the worst. Like the beaches in Maine and Rhode Island? God, can you believe he suggested Maine as a possible location? We just got _out_ of Maine. I’m not in any rush to go back, _even_ _if_ the clown’s dead.”

Ben nods agreeably, waiting for Eddie to tick off all his boxes. He rants a little longer, and Duke rolls around on his back for Eddie to keep scratching at his ribs, tongue lolling out the side of his open mouth.

“It’s gonna be _freezing_ where they wanna film. All those cliffs overlooking the ocean to _simulate_ _the English moor_ , and do you know what else? There are _moose_ in Nova Scotia. They can weigh as much as fifteen hundred pounds _and tear the roofs off cars,_ never mind what they’d do to a person.

“Nova Scotia’s great and all, don’t get me wrong. It’s right out of a postcard. I went once for work, but that was August, and Myra had me on the phone the whole time—” Eddie bites off the end of the last word to cut himself off. He clears his throat and rolls his eyes at himself, seems to decide something, and says, grouchily, “Or maybe I’m making a big deal out of nothing. Wire work. Yeah, could be fun.”

Duke huffs, oblivious, and Ben gives him a few robust pats down his sides.

“Have you talked to Myra since the divorce?”

Eddie looks up at him, a look so blank he almost looks like those untouchable models in cologne ads. Really, as much as everyone gives Ben a hard time over his supposed good looks, he wonders if Eddie even knows how handsome he is, whether frantic or austere or both.

“No,” he says without any inflection.

“Bev doesn’t talk to Tom either,” Ben says, hoping he didn’t put Eddie on the spot by asking.

Eddie holds his hand out over the side of the boat and waves it around until the dog hair flies off his fingers. He sighs, and the edges in his face smooth out. In a voice like when they were kids and he was asking his mom for permission to go out with them, he says, “Tom was a bastard,” like he’s conceding a point he doesn’t think he can claim for himself.

Ben remembers what Eddie said on their first video chat with Stan, after Derry. Remembers what Myra told him, about his arm. He sits with it for a while, not sure if it’s okay to mention it or not.

His phone chimes, and they both startle toward it. Ben unlocks the screen to accept the call.

“Hey, Bev.”

_“Hey, I ordered Thai for dinner, should be here in the next twenty minutes or so.”_

“Sounds great. Thanks for doing that. Bev ordered Thai food.”

“Cool. I’ll get dinner tomorrow, okay?”

_“Don’t you dare,”_ Bev says in a cheerful voice. _“Tell Eddie he’s a guest, and he’s to do no such thing.”_

Ben tactfully doesn’t remind Bev that she’s also a guest in his home and smiles apologetically at Eddie, telling him, “Bev said no, Eddie.”

Eddie pouts. “If it was anyone else, you’d let them.”

_“Eddie, we just—”_ her voice ramps up when Ben switches her over to speakerphone. _“— care of you.”_

“Everybody always just wants to take care of me,” he mutters, fiddling around on his phone to open the camera. He turns the other way around to take a picture of the sunset, effectively marking the topic as closed.

Ben backs off and takes Bev off speakerphone. “We’ll head back here in a minute.”

_“Is he okay?”_

“Yeah,” he says, not wanting to get into a conversation about Eddie’s wellbeing when he’s right there and clearly already upset. “See you in a bit.”

_“I’ll keep a look out for white sails,”_ she says, and hangs up.

Ben turns back around to Eddie. He’s got his phone at an angle to catch a few extra bars and a choppy video playing. Ben can’t see it from where he’s standing, but he can hear two different voices, one speaking with a crisp, middle American accent and the other with a more lilting Southern drawl. The two banter back and forth, followed by an uproar of laughter.

“Is that Richie?”

“Yeah. Remember that standup comic in Santa Monica who dragged him in front of the whole audience? They’ve been doing this weird improv thing where they just ad lib a set in each other’s accents. People seem to really like it.”

Ben looks over his shoulder, and Eddie holds up his phone so he can see the buffering screen. He squints, trying to make out the face but only catching grainy angles and suggestions of color. “How are they?” he asks, having missed whatever punchline had people cracking up in their seats.

“They’re really good,” Eddie says, but he doesn’t sound all that enthusiastic about it.

“Hey, I’m sorry.”

“What? Oh, don’t worry about it.”

“No, but you’re right. We fuss over you a lot, probably more now. You must hate it.”

“I don’t, it’s just… not hating it’s kind of the problem, Ben. You know? It gets all twisted up in everything else for me, and then I don’t know how to be without it.”

“I understand.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, well… Yeah. It’s like… like my mom had me on all these different diets when I was a kid, and we’d exercise or go for walks or do pushups. All the time, pretty much. I think you guys knew, but— but it just got worse after we moved, and… well, you know Bowers and Hockstetter used to call me Tits, and…” He bunches his fingers up in his shirt where the twice-carved scar sits. “It was bad at my new school, too. Maybe worse. The teachers got in on it just as much as the kids did.”

Eddie’s looking back at him when Ben lifts his gaze. He looks just as serious as ever, hanging on Ben’s every word.

“And I guess— I knew they were never gonna change their minds about my body, so I changed my body.”

Eddie recoils, not in a big way, but enough that Ben can see how that statement lands like a physical blow. A tendon jumps in his jaw, and he says, “That’s fucked up, Ben. I’m sorry.”

“It worked.” Ben shrugs and dusts his hands together, but the way Eddie’s looking right into the heart of him makes his eyes sting. “I don’t know, Eddie. It worked. I used to hate all that stuff, but then I adopted it, and it became my lifestyle.”

“Ben,” Eddie says, grabbing his wrist and tugging him over to sit down next to him. “You get that by your own definition, you buying into their bullshit ideas is just as fucked as Myra controlling me, or Tom—”

“It’s not! I’m healthy now,” Ben insists, adamant.

“You don’t need washboard abs to be healthy, dude. You sure as shit don’t need ‘em _to be a fucking architect._ And while we’re on the subject of your abs, the next time you’re _hungry_ _in your own house_ at _2am,_ just eat cold pizza over the sink like the rest of us, you freak. You _hate_ those gross ass rice cakes, I know you do.”

“But— you all like how I look now.”

Eddie stares at him, his imperious, offended expression melting into something that looks an awful lot like mortification. _“Oh, my God, Ben._ It’s a _novelty,_ it’s not the reason we like you. We like you because you stood with us the day of the Rock War and because you showed us how to build a dam out of sticks and mud and because you unironically _loved_ New Kids on the Block, you fucking dork.”

Ben snorts, but true to form, Eddie’s not done yet.

“Do you ever just think about how _nice_ you are? Everything you ever helped us build was communal stuff. Shared spaces where everyone could get together and feel safe. That’s you, Ben. Not your face or your flat stomach or any of that bullshit. _Fuck_ your liability.”

“It’s starting to sound like you’ve got a new catchphrase, Eddie,” Ben chuckles, covertly pressing his fingers to the wet corners of his eyes.

“I don’t give a shit. It’s true, and I’ll keep saying it.”

“Yeah,” Ben says, laughing. “I know you will.”

“Some people can look right at you and make you feel like you’re nothing,” Eddie tells him, dumping their phones back in the baggie and zipping it closed. “But _they’re_ the ones. Like the fucking clown, Ben.”

Warmth spills over behind Ben’s sternum. “Where’d you get to be so smart, Eddie?”

“Mike.” Eddie drains the last of his water bottle and twists the cap back onto it. “Also, I’ve been seeing a therapist because it’s the twenty-teens, and that’s what grown-ass people with health insurance do when they have trauma and unhealthy relationships in their past. It’s part of why I’m… _trying_ to get out of my comfort zone. To challenge myself, and do things that I wouldn’t have done before.”

Ben blinks, totally blindsided by that. Eddie sighs, a red flush creeping up his neck.

“Where did you think I was going every Tuesday afternoon since I got here?”

“…I guess I thought you were just stretching your legs.”

“You know, Ben, for an architect, you lack imagination. That’s okay, we like you anyway.” He claps his hand on Ben’s shoulder, grip warm and strong. “Let’s head back. I’m starving.”

“Sure, Eddie,” Ben says, bracing his hands on his knees to stand up. On his way there, he bends down to kiss Eddie’s forehead.

“Just for that, you’re having ice cream for dessert,” he snipes, already turning red by the time Ben pulls back to smile at him. “With chocolate syrup on top.”

“Affection is a love language, Eddie,” Ben teases, fishing the keys out of his pocket and twirling them on his finger.

“So is food, asshole. File it away under quality time and acts of service. Which, by the way, is why you should let me get dinner tomorrow night. But what the fuck ever. Your house, your rules.”

Ben grins down at the steering wheel and takes down the orange flag. “Okay, but you’re telling Bev.”

Eddie looks over at him, and while he’s not quite matching Ben’s grin, he looks happy. Relaxed.

“Ready?”

“Yeah, let’s go.”

Ben starts the engine, and then they’re off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> G R O O V Y


End file.
